Raleigh lawyer's 18-year battle against Roy Cooper gets another go in court

In this fast-paced world of politics where a single tweet can torpedo a campaign in seconds flat, 18 years can seem like eons.

But that's how long Raleigh lawyer Gene Boyce has been fighting Gov. Roy Cooper over a campaign ad that ran in 2000.

His son, Dan Boyce, also a Raleigh lawyer and a Republican, ran unsuccessfully against Cooper for attorney general in 2000, Cooper's first campaign for statewide office.

Both Boyces sued Cooper in November 2000, alleging libel in his campaign ads.

The case took a circuitous route through state and federal courts for more than a decade until the Boyce family and Cooper brokered a settlement in 2014 that led to an apology from the former state attorney general and an agreement from his insurer to pay $75,000 in legal costs to the Boyce family.

Then in 2016, shortly before Cooper announced his plans to run for governor, Gene Boyce filed another lawsuit.

This time it was against the North Carolina State Bar for its failure to take up his complaint against Cooper.

Boyce had asked the Bar, which oversees lawyers in this state, to investigate whether Cooper violated ethics codes and professional standards when he ran a campaign ad claiming that the Boyces' law firm charged excessive attorney fees in a class-action tax case they won against the state.

After not hearing back from the Bar, Boyce turned to a Superior Court judge, alleging that the Bar had a conflict of interest and the courts should step in.

Boyce, whose law career began in 1956 and includes such footnotes as serving as assistant chief counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee, wanted the judge to either force the Bar to investigate his complaint against Cooper or do so himself.

In the complaint, Boyce says that as an attorney he has an obligation to report the professional misconduct of other attorneys to the State Bar. Boyce also contended the State Bar had a conflict of interest in the matter because Cooper also represented the Bar in cases against the organization that oversees attorneys in this state.

In May 2016, Wake County Superior Court Judge Don Stephens ruled against Boyce.

But on Tuesday, the state Court of Appeals gave Boyce's protracted dispute new breath.

In a unanimous decision that upheld two parts of Stephens' three-pronged ruling, a three-judge panel sent the case back to the trial court for further proceedings.

The judges — .Republican Robert N. Hunter Jr., Democrat Wanda Bryant and Republican Richard Dietz — agreed with Boyce that the North Carolina courts could be called on to investigate a lawyer if the state Bar had a conflict of interest. The panel also agreed with the Superior Court judge that Boyce did not have standing to bring the claims he did against the bar nor could he show he had been harmed.

Efforts to reach Boyce after the ruling were unsuccessful.

Morgan Jackson, a Democratic strategist, said since the judges had agreed that Boyce did not have standing to bring the case against the Bar that next steps were unclear.

"This is a political battle that's over," Jackson said. "But instead of letting it go they are taking up the court's time and money to settle an old score that's already been settled."

This story was originally published April 3, 2018 at 5:48 PM with the headline "Raleigh lawyer's 18-year battle against Roy Cooper gets another go in court."