The New Jersey Supreme Court on Wednesday reprimanded and suspended a veteran Passaic lawyer who paid a lay employee $780,000 for steering personal injury cases to the firm, and censured the lawyer's partner for related conduct.

The court suspended Anthony Fusco Jr. for three months, a quarter of the one-year suspension the Disciplinary Review Board had urged as a sanction for what it found to be an unethical fee sharing in violation of New Jersey Rules of Professional Conduct 5.3(a), 5.4(a) and 7.3(d), among other strictures.

The court also censured Fusco's partner, Roy Macaluso, who is in charge of the personal injury practice at Passaic's Fusco & Macaluso, for violating the same RPCs. The DRB recommended the lighter sanction for Macaluso because it found Fusco wielded ultimate decision-making authority over compensation.

The firm paid the office manager, Adam Greenspan, sums equivalent to more than one-third of the fees generated in about 700 personal injury cases, in recognition of his networking with friends, relatives and an unidentified chiropractor for prospective clients.

In 2001, Greenspan's best year, he earned $31,000 in base salary and another $196,000 in percentage payments, the DRB found. In May 2003, after an Office of Attorney Ethics auditor told Fusco the payment scheme was improper, Greenspan began earning a base salary of $100,000 a year.

OAE Assistant Counsel Michael Sweeney argued to the court at a Jan. 6 hearing that Fusco knew the arrangement was improper all along, pointing out that Fusco took the trouble of making checks out to himself, endorsing them and then turning them over to Greenspan, who then cashed them.

Fusco's lawyer, Justin Walder, blamed an accountant no longer employed by the firm for setting up the payment system and said Fusco was not aware the arrangement was improper until the OAE auditor told him.

Fusco acknowledged the impropriety but said Greenspan -- who remains the firm's office manager -- is a "hard-working employee" who deserves the compensation. "He sits like a policy person with us," Fusco told the court. "I would not enjoy the success that I do without Mr. Greenspan."

Walder says Fusco accepts the punishment and is grateful he was not suspended for a full year, which he had argued would ruin the firm. The suspension begins on Feb. 20.

"The court appropriately recognized that these were meritorious cases that were not improperly solicited and that at all times the employee was properly supervised," says Walder, of Roseland's Walder, Hayden & Brogan. "I believe there was adequate justification that a one-year suspension was not the correct measure of discipline."