The Virginia State Bar Clients’ Protection Fund Board has issued a third round of payments to former clients of a disbarred Staunton attorney, pushing its refund total past $200,000 for questionable legal work that first landed the attorney in hot water a few years ago.
On May 29, the board announced that a family member of a former client of attorney Dale R .Jensen of Staunton was issued a reimbursement of $25,750 for unearned fees in a criminal law matter.
“Jensen committed dishonest conduct by promoting an unviable legal theory in filing a motion to vacate in this case,” the board said last week.
Jensen’s license to practice law was revoked in October 2023 after he charged clients exorbitant fees for filing motions based on legal arguments that had already been rejected by numerous courts. His law license was first suspended in 2022. After his license was then revoked, Jensen appealed and filed a petition for a stay of execution. The Virginia Supreme Court denied his petition in January 2024 and in April 2024 dismissed the appeal.
Jensen, 66, first came under scrutiny after it was revealed that legal work he’d done — motions to vacate previous convictions — consisted of nothing more than losing arguments that were copied and pasted from previous motions from cases of other clients, according to the bar.
Jensen advertised his services in a prison publication. Almost all of his former clients associated with the flawed legal work are pulling lengthy sentences, most of them for murder, including two lifers and another inmate not scheduled for release until 2071. Two others have sentences of 26 and 30 years.
The bar said Jensen would sometimes reuse arguments that didn’t apply to a client’s case, and identical typos also appeared to show he didn’t proofread his copies. Some of the mistakes weren’t spotted or corrected for several years, the bar said.
Jensen and his staff advised the imprisoned clients the court filings were likely to succeed, convincing clients or their family members to pay thousands of dollars in legal fees to argue that their initial indictments were supposedly defective. He would ask for a flat fee, usually $3,000, to review the case. Then Jensen would collect thousands more dollars, sometimes as high as $25,000, to file a motion to vacate.
Some of Jensen’s clients liquidated their entire savings while others used high-interest bearing credit cards to pay his fees.
In June 2024, the board dispersed $119,460 to four former clients who were previously billed by Jensen for his shoddy legal work. In October, the board doled out another $68,550 for three more former clients in a partial reimbursement of their fees, according to the bar. With the most recent disbursement of $25,750, that brings the reimbursement total to $213,760.
The Clients’ Protection Fund was created by the Supreme Court of Virginia in the mid-1970s to reimburse people who suffer a quantifiable financial loss because of dishonest conduct by a Virginia attorney whose law license has been suspended or revoked for disciplinary reasons, or who has died and did not properly maintain client funds, according to the bar. The fund is supported by attorneys who pay a small annual fee.
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In November, Jensen told The News Leader that his ill-fated attempt to “give back to the judicialsystem” by assisting inmates caused the bar to destroy “my life both professionally and financially. They have silenced my voice in the courts of Virginia. In the long run, I hope that more people will become aware of the abuses and tyranny of the Virginia judiciary and that citizen rights will be restored.”
The disbarred attorney also continued to maintain that the civil rights of his former clients were violated after they were wrongly indicted.
“In order to make sure that my voice remains silent in the courts, the Virginia State Bar arbitrarily determined that none of my many hours of work had any value,” Jensen said. “I provided documents showing that I fully earned the fees paid by the former clients. The payments from the ‘Victim’s Recovery Fund’ were improper and contrary to their own rules,” he said.
Brad Zinn is the cops, courts and breaking news reporter at The News Leader. Have a news tip? Or something that needs investigating? You can email reporter Brad Zinn (he/him) at bzinn@newsleader.com. You can also follow him on X (formerly Twitter).
This article originally appeared on Staunton News Leader: Reimbursements surpass $200k for shoddy legal work by Staunton lawyer