Every lawyer in Minnesota takes an oath that means little until it is tested. They swear to support the Constitution, to discharge their duties faithfully, and to conduct themselves with honesty and integrity. Gregory Walz took that oath when he began practicing law in 1987, and for nearly four decades he worked as an attorney in St. Cloud. But on Oct. 12, the Minnesota Supreme Court issued an order that tested the meaning of that oath and found it wanting. The court suspended Walz, effective Oct. 26, for making false statements in court proceedings, falsifying information in tax documents, and representing multiple family members in a case riddled with conflicts of interest. The suspension is not the end of the story, but it is a serious and public marker. Walz cannot petition for reinstatement for at least six months. When and if he does, he will have to pass a written examination and complete the continuing legal education requirements that every Minnesota attorney must satisfy. The court also made a point of noting that Associate Justice Sarah Hennesy, who lives and works in St. Cloud, took no part in the consideration or decision. Hennesy’s recusal is a reminder that this case is not just a set of legal abstractions. It involves a local lawyer, local families, and a local tragedy that has now become part of Minnesota’s legal history. The suspension did not come out of nowhere. It followed a September 2025 public reprimand in which the Office of Lawyers Professional Responsibility laid out 28 pages of disciplinary history and additional allegations stemming from a 2017 car crash. For a lawyer who had spent decades building a practice, the final fall must feel like a long, slow collapse.
To understand how a respected lawyer ended up in this position, you have to go back to 2017, when a commercial vehicle from Coburn’s was involved in a crash that tore through Walz’s family. Members of his family were injured. His grandson, a child, did not survive. In the aftermath of that horrible loss, Walz took on the natural role of family protector. He began representing himself and his injured relatives in claims against Coburn’s. His wife became the trustee for the heirs and next of kin of the grandson who died. To a grieving family, this might have seemed like the most practical arrangement: a lawyer in the family, a spouse trusted by everyone, a single case to seek justice for multiple victims. But the Office of Lawyers Professional Responsibility later identified a fundamental problem. Walz had placed himself in a position where his own interests and the interests of his family members were in direct conflict. As attorney for all plaintiffs, he was obligated to advocate for each person’s best interests. Yet he was also a plaintiff. His wife, as trustee, was also a party. That meant any settlement division involved a personal stake. If his wife received more as trustee, then a minor granddaughter injured in the accident could receive less. If Walz charged higher attorney fees, the family members’ recovery would shrink. The legal system has rules against representing conflicting interests for a good reason: human beings are not good at being impartial when their own money is on the table. The OLPR filing put it plainly: because Walz and his wife were parties, he would have a personal interest in dividing any settlement so that the trustee could receive a larger share than someone else who was injured. That conflict, once ignored, would poison everything that followed.
Despite the conflict, the case moved forward, and a settlement was reached. In November 2019, according to the timeline in court records, Walz’s co-counsel, James Roberts, negotiated a $2.75 million settlement with Coburn’s. It should have been a moment of relief, a way for the family to begin healing. But in January 2020, two months after the settlement, Walz filed an amended petition that would change the way the money was distributed. Court records show that the amendment reduced the amount set aside for his minor granddaughter, who had also been injured in the crash, and increased the amount to be paid to the trustee—his wife. The same petition raised Walz’s own attorney fees and lowered the fees of his co-counsel, Roberts. In other words, the lawyer who was supposed to protect a child and a family instead shifted money away from the child and toward himself and his wife. The court did not let it stand. In May 2020, it granted Roberts’s petition for 80% of the attorney’s fee lien. The reason was stark: the court concluded that Roberts had contributed 94% of the time and cost that led to the settlement. The court directed the remaining 14% of the attorney’s fees to be placed in an interest-bearing account for the deceased sister. It was a clear rejection of Walz’s attempt to inflate his own role and enrich himself at the expense of his co-counsel and his family. But Walz did not accept the ruling. He tried again, filing another petition to redistribute the funds. The court denied that petition too. And that is when his behavior took an even darker turn.
Later that year, after the court denied his petition, Walz let go of whatever professional restraint he had left. He declared that the legal system was in collapse. He said the court was biased against him. He insisted that his co-counsel had not produced a single piece of competent work. These were not private complaints; they were made in court filings, public records that followed him through the courts. The 2025 petition for a public reprimand says he continued to repeat those claims through appeals and before every new judge assigned to the case. The case went through a series of judges. In 2022, Judge Mary Mahler became the third judge assigned to the matter and the second to hear the attorney-lien fight. She recused herself, and her reason was devastating. “In this Court’s Opinion, Respondent’s counsel has misstated law and facts in Court pleadings to such an extent that this Court cannot preside over this case in a fair and impartial manner,” she said. It is one thing for an opponent to criticize a lawyer. It is another for a judge to say that a lawyer’s pleadings are so unreliable that the judge cannot trust them. That statement alone is a powerful illustration of how far Walz had strayed from the standard of candor owed to the court. The Supreme Court’s suspension order listed the specific offenses: repeatedly filing frivolous pleadings or appeals; knowingly disobeying court orders; failing to comply with orders to show cause; and making false statements about the integrity of several judges, opposing counsel, court processes, and co-counsel. And then there was the tax document. Walz was also accused of falsely claiming on a tax document that he had paid his co-counsel $487,888.71. That is not a small bookkeeping error. It is a deliberate misrepresentation, and it undermines the entire system of trust on which courts and clients depend.
Walz’s career did not begin with this catastrophe. He first began practicing law in Minnesota in 1987, which means he had more than three decades of experience when the crash happened. But his disciplinary record was already blemished. In 2000, he received an admonition for failing to handle a client’s child support and visitation matter with adequate diligence and communication. In 2004, he was admonished again, this time for charging a client for services rendered after he had withdrawn from representation. In 2009, he was admonished for failing to recognize and bring a serious procedural error to the court’s attention. These earlier admonitions might seem minor compared with the conduct that led to the suspension. But they matter because they show a pattern. A single mistake can happen to any lawyer. Repeated failures of diligence, communication, and candor suggest a habit of treating the rules as optional. By the time the Coburn case arrived, Walz had been warned at least three times that his behavior fell below professional standards. Instead of using those warnings to become more careful, he appears to have become more convinced that he knew better than the courts. The suspension order is not just about one settlement, one judge, or one family. It is about a lawyer who, over the course of decades, lost sight of the basic principle that a lawyer’s duty to the court and to the truth must override personal interest. The tragedy of the car crash may explain why Walz wanted to be involved in the case. It does not explain why he tried to reduce his granddaughter’s share of the settlement. It does not explain why he lied about paying his co-counsel. Grief does not make those choices; they come from a deeper willingness to bend the law for personal gain.
The consequences are not abstract. The Minnesota Supreme Court’s order means Walz cannot practice law for at least six months. It means he must undergo a written examination before any return. It means he must satisfy the continuing legal education requirements that Minnesota imposes on every lawyer. It means the public record will forever show that he was suspended for making false statements, falsifying tax information, and representing clients with a conflict of interest. The September 2025 public reprimand had already laid out 28 pages of disciplinary history and additional allegations related to the 2017 crash. Now the Supreme Court has added a suspension to that record. As of Oct. 22, Walz had not responded to the St. Cloud Times’s request for comment. Perhaps he is still deciding what to say, or perhaps he has accepted that nothing he says can change the record. But his case is worth pausing over, not as a scandal, but as a cautionary story. The law is a profession built on trust. Clients trust lawyers with their money, their futures, and sometimes their children. Courts trust lawyers to be honest about facts and precedent. Opponents trust lawyers to keep their word. When a lawyer breaks that trust, the damage goes far beyond one case. It makes clients suspicious of every lawyer. It makes judges scrutinize every filing. It makes the entire system slower, angrier, and more expensive. For the Walz family, the crash was an unimaginable loss. The legal malpractice that followed compounded that loss with betrayal. For the legal profession, the suspension is a reminder that no one is above the rules, not even a lawyer with 38 years of experience. Walz may one day return to the practice of law. But he will have to prove, through a written examination and a serious review of his conduct, that he is fit to be trusted again. That is exactly how it should be.