MD high court temporarily suspends Stephen Snyder’s law license

Listen to this article

The Maryland Supreme Court has temporarily suspended Stephen Snyder‘s law license in the state.

In an order filed Monday, the high court temporarily suspended Snyder from practicing law in Maryland after he failed to file a response as to why he should not be suspended.

The order comes two months after the U.S. District Court in Baltimore found Snyder guilty of attempted extortion and related charges in connection with a $25 million consulting agreement Snyder sought with the University of Maryland Medical System (UMMS) in 2018.

At the time, Snyder represented Michele Sanders, the wife of a man who died 13 months after a kidney transplant at the system’s flagship hospital in Baltimore.

Prosecutors say the agreement was a “sham” and a “shake-down,” and that Snyder crossed a line. UMMS officials said they felt threatened and that no plaintiff’s lawyer had ever made such a demand. They settled Sanders’ case for $5 million and did not agree to the consultancy.

Testimony and evidence showed that Snyder threatened to go on a media blitz alleging the UMMS transplant program prioritized profit over safety and gave high-risk kidneys to people who didn’t need them. On multiple occasions, he referred to the information he collected as a “gold mine.”

The agreement would have conflicted him out of future claims against the UMMS transplant program, and in meetings with UMMS officials, he expressed no interest in working for the money.

Snyder maintains that he was entrapped and that he was simply being a tough lawyer when he showed hospital officials a video they considered false and inflammatory, which included footage of Sanders’ husband, Jeffrey Sanders, in his hospital bed in the last weeks of his life.

Snyder testified that he wanted the transplant program to be sanctioned and that he wanted to “scare the hell out of them,” but did not want to destroy the program.

Snyder and his standby counsel, Baltimore attorney C. Justin Brown, did not immediately respond to The Daily Record’s request for comment Tuesday.

Snyder made millions taking only a handful of clients with “catastrophic” medical malpractice cases each year, testifying at trial of his long record of multimillion-dollar settlements and his lavish South Florida lifestyle.

In December, U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman described Snyder as “financially unable to obtain counsel” in an order that appointed Brown as Snyder standby counsel under the Criminal Justice Act.