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Research, Public records study

When lawyers take client money: what Minnesota's records show

741 claims and $8.97 million repaid since 1987 by the Client Security Board, by practice area, with 2025 discipline figures and arrests by judicial district.

Collected Nov 6, 2026. Last updated Nov 6, 2026. Not yet reviewed by Minnesota counsel. Download the data (CSV)

Draft for human review. This study was run by AI-assisted scripts on public files. No person has reviewed it, and no Minnesota lawyer has reviewed it. It is general information, and no firm is ranked or recommended.

The charts, county map and findings for this study are on one page.

See the charts and county map

Question, sample and how items were counted

Question: What do state records show about lawyers and client money, and about complaints and discipline?
Sample: Client Security Board awards from 1987 through June 30, 2026, and Lawyers Board figures for 2025.
Who is included: Every category in the published tables. No lawyer or firm is named or scored.
Method: A script reads the board's published table and checks that categories sum to the grand total in claims and dollars. Lawyers Board and arrest figures are checked against the saved report text by a test.

Limitations

The award counts have no denominator of lawyers by practice area, so they are not rates and cannot show one area is riskier.
A complaint is not a finding, and a dismissal does not show a complaint lacked any basis.
A clean record is not proof of skill.

What we could not collect

Public defender caseloads
The state's site blocked automated requests, and we did not go around that.

Sources and files

Client Security Board 2026 annual report
Lawyers Professional Responsibility Board 2026 annual report
Minnesota Uniform Crime Report 2025 (amended)
Data for every row in this study: client-security-awards.csv
Every figure is computed by a script from saved copies of these files.

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