This looks really bad, like client misconduct made representation impossible. You may note that if the court has a problem with him withdrawing, he is essentially inviting the judge to reach out to him and ask for information ex parte. Why would he do that?
Possibly because Aaron pulled some stunt that is protected from disclosure under attorney/client privilege but requires that he withdraw.
The obvious potential issues from Aaron would be:
Even if it is an ethical constraint making it impossible to continue regardless of whether he's paid in full, that wouldn't necessarily have to involve client misconduct or perjury like Nick is implying, and could be a conflict of interest that truly was "unforeseen": not a conflict between Aaron and some former or prospective client of Montgomery's firm, but between the minor child's two joint legal custodians. Let's not forget that the divorce decree granted Ashley and Aaron joint physical custody and joint
legal custody even though she happens to exercise more days of parenting time per year than he does. In Minnesota, joint legal custody of course usually comes up when mutual decisions are needed for educational, medical, and religious purposes, but that list is not exclusive and can include other major decisions:
518.003 DEFINITIONS.
...
Subd. 3. Custody. Unless otherwise agreed by the parties:
...(b) "Joint legal custody" means that both parents have equal rights and responsibilities, including the right to participate in major decisions determining the child's upbringing, including education, health care, and religious training.
[L]
I can't seem to find any case law on the scope of what other types of "major decisions" must be made by both parents (other than some briefing about disputed enforceability of liability releases that only one of two joint legal custodians signed on behalf of a minor child, which went to a decision on other grounds), but common sense would dictate that commencing full-blown litigation on behalf of the minor should be one of them.
Think about it: do we even really know anything about Ashley's take on this whole fiasco? So far all we've seen is that Montgomery slapped her name and number on a witness list, but that could have been done solely on his client's say-so and Aaron might have even been telling the truth when telling Montgomery that he couldn't possibly imagine that Ashley would ever have a problem with it. Then, when Montgomery reaches out to her in the following couple days to briefly prepare for her testimony, for all we know she might have told Montgomery that she was completely blindsided by Aaron filing the HRO petition unilaterally without even so much as consulting with her about the topic for months, that she would have declined consent to it if asked because her rumored C&D efforts back in late 2024 had already obtained some sort of private agreement (or at least tentative truce) with MAPton that got him to knock off the comments about the kids since that time, and that she has since considered this a dead issue until Aaron dredged it back up in an emotional, impulsive moment after his sentencing hearing for his own selfish purposes that Ashley couldn't give a flying fuck about.
If anything even remotely like that happened, then it would have put Montgomery in an impossible position akin to a conflict of interest, where he can pursue Aaron's interests in both cases but is not properly authorized to pursue the daughter's interests in one of the two cases, and the court's
de facto (if not formal) consolidation of the two cases make the operative facts and legal issues too intertwined for him to represent his client effectively even if there were a workable procedural mechanism for the daughter's interest to be bifurcated somehow. The only safe thing to do would be to withdraw entirely, even though there wasn't some nefarious misdeed by Aaron that shocks the conscience and he was only characteristically ignorant of what legal hoops he was supposed to have jumped through, which could also explain Montgomery's oddly conciliatory and somewhat pitying tone adopted in that letter.
I wouldn't bet the farm on this theory yet until there's more information that we may never get since Aaron has been extraordinarily tight-lipped lately, but it's plausible enough to add to the list of possibilities.
