Idaho Supreme Court criticizes a longtime Boise lawyer. He’s unrepentant. What happened

A Nampa woman sought to sue for medical malpractice in a hernia repair that went wrong, only to see her Boise lawyer miss the legal deadline for suing. So she and her husband hired another Boise lawyer to file a different malpractice lawsuit — against the first lawyer.

Lawyer No. 2 lost his case against Lawyer No. 1 before a state judge in Boise. So Lawyer No. 2 appealed to the Idaho Supreme Court.

That court has now ruled against the woman, affirming the lower court’s decision. And perhaps just as importantly, it ruled against Lawyer No. 2 himself. The court’s unanimous ruling sharply criticized him, calling his case “frivolous” and saying he bungled his legal arguments and instead substituted unfounded personal attacks on the lower-court judge.

You must pay the winning side’s legal fees yourself, not charge them to your client, the court ordered.

It was a striking rebuke of a long-practicing local attorney by Idaho’s highest legal authority.

That lawyer, Angelo L. Rosa, is unrepentant. And his client, Julene Dodd, is sticking with him.

A surgery followed by incapacitating sickness

The Idaho Statesman chronicled Dodd’s struggle in a September story. She was 65 when she was admitted to Saint Alphonsus Medical Center in Nampa in 2017 with what turned out to be a large hiatal hernia. Dodd said a doctor’s surgery led to life-threatening medical problems that left her with end-stage kidney disease.

The surgery was followed by sepsis, and the hospital’s “refusal to take corrective actions until the sepsis brought me to the edge of death rendered me unable to work due to exhaustion, the inability to mentally focus, and the inability to sit or stand for any length of time,” Dodd said in a declaration filed in court.

Dodd and her husband, William, hired Boise lawyer Rory Jones to sue the surgeon and Saint Alphonsus for medical malpractice, seeking $5 million. Jones had represented Dodd in a divorce case about two decades earlier. But hiring Jones again only brought more woes, as his failure to file her case within the two-year statute of limitations led to its dismissal.

The Dodds then hired Rosa, who has practiced in Boise for more than 20 years, to sue Jones, alleging legal malpractice. But that case failed, too.

Ada County District Judge Cynthia Yee-Wallace excluded the testimony of Dodd’s medical expert, saying that he failed to show that he understood the community standard of care in Nampa, the Statesman reported in September.

And the state medical board concluded that neither the doctor, Forrest Fredline, nor Saint Alphonsus had committed medical malpractice. Dodd’s post-surgery problem was “a known recognized complication” of Fredline’s surgery, the board said.

2 malpractices cases, medical and legal, in one

Those medical conclusions were important in Dodd’s legal-malpractice lawsuit because, to show that Jones had committed legal malpractice, the Dodds first had to show that the physician committed medical malpractice, since that claim underlay the legal-malpractice case. Under the law, Dodd had to prove a case within a case — a heavier-than-usual legal burden.

Yee-Wallace said the arguments fell short. She granted Jones’ request to decide the case in Jones’ favor without holding a jury trial.

Afterward, Rosa said Yee-Wallace, who was appointed by Gov. Brad Little in 2021 and won election to the seat in 2022, was inexperienced when she ruled in 2023 and couldn’t see “the big picture.” He condemned Idaho’s legal system for consistently ruling in favor of lawyers in legal-malpractice cases.

Rosa said Dodd “is the example of what happens when professionals are not held accountable.”

Rosa told the Statesman in September that Dodd spent two years on a transplant list before a kidney became available. But she had to turn it down, he said. “They couldn’t afford even the Medicare copay,” Rosa said.

The Dodds survive on William Dodd’s income as a long-haul truck driver. Rosa said in September that the cost of the transplant procedure is about $500,000. Medicare would pay 80%. Anti-rejection medications would cost Dodd over $1,500 a month for the rest of her life.

Justices unanimous: Rosa fouled up

The Supreme Court held a hearing on Rosa’s appeal on Sept. 9. On March 3, all five justices ruled that Yee-Wallace’s judgment was correct. It was Rosa who botched the case, they implied: He “at times failed to cite legal authority to support the appeal, misconstrued and misquoted this Court’s precedent and lobbed hyperbolic personal attacks at the district court.”

Rosa’s main argument, the court said, was that Jones was now trying to say that no medical malpractice occurred when Jones’ too-late lawsuit said it had. The high court sided with Jones’ argument that his lawsuit on the Dodds’ behalf did not prohibit him from arguing now that no medical malpractice occurred. That freedom is vital to enable lawyers to represent future clients vigorously, the justices said.

Jones, a Boise lawyer since 1982 and a former president of the Boise school board, did not respond to two Statesman emails requesting an interview.

The court also shot down Rosa’s contention that Yee-Wallace abused her discretion by excluding testimony from the Dodds’ experts. The justices said Rosa’s claims of judicial bias by Yee-Wallace was “essentially a tantrum against a judge’s decision by one who did not adequately do the foundational work to present the case in the trial court as required by Idaho law.”

The justices awarded Jones attorneys fees, as he requested, but said “responsibility for the frivolous nature of this appeal lies at the feet of the Dodds’ counsel, Angelo Rosa — not the Dodds.” It ordered Rosa to pay Jones’s fees as a sanction on Rosa’s behavior.

‘A good and honest woman … has suffered’

Rosa told the Statesman on Friday that he stands by his previous criticism and believes the Supreme Court’s decision proves his point about judicial bias.

“The passion of my advocacy was (and remains) driven by the sympathy I have for a good and honest woman who has suffered at the hands of those who owed her the highest duties of care,” he said by email. “Malpractice is a taboo subject in Idaho’s small and interconnected legal community. In the past 30 years, there has not been a single appellate opinion favoring a client in a legal malpractice action.”

He said the Dodds “wish to carry on with the pursuit of available remedies. Certain decisions made by the Court when issuing its opinion have created a broader scope of remedies.” He declined to disclose what those remedies may be.

Rosa also did not say whether he would pay the attorneys fees as ordered. “There are many steps that can, and must, be taken for Julene’s sake before the issue of sanctions against me can be resolved,” he said.

Dodd has not given up hope despite the series of defeats. She told the Statesman by text Friday that Rosa remains her attorney.

She declined a request for an interview, suggesting that she might join a three-way call with Rosa and the Statesman. But Rosa, citing a last-minute work obligation, canceled a scheduled call and answered questions by email instead.

Do justices need self-reflection?

Rosa called the five Supreme Court justices — Chief Justice G. Richard Bevan and Justices Robyn M. Brody, Gregory W. Moeller, Colleen D. Zahn and Cynthia K.C. Meyer — “remarkable jurists” and “decent human beings.” But he told the Statesman that they need to look into themselves.

“Focusing on the real issues would require a degree of self-reflection of the bench and bar that is uncomfortable but necessary,” Rosa said. “My hope is that a more evolved approach will eventually be taken in matters such as this.”

As for the justices? In their ruling, they said Rosa’s behavior evoked an old legal saying attributed to the late American poet Carl Sandburg. They wrote: “Rosa’s personal attacks recall an oft-quoted adage: ‘If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell.”

This story was originally published March 15, 2025 at 4:00 AM with the headline "Idaho Supreme Court criticizes a longtime Boise lawyer. He’s unrepentant. What happened."