The court hearing was an uneventful formality. The elevator afterward was not.

“Any idiot would know you can’t represent an attorney in an ethics issue and then turn around and claim that attorney is unethical,” embattled attorney John L. Steele told his opposing counsel on the ride back to the lobby.

Steele was in court this morning asking U.S. District Judge Milton I. Shadur to approve $9,304.75 in sanctions to be paid by his opposing counsel from Voelker Litigation Group.

The sanctions result from a motion the Voelker Litigation Group filed this summer seeking to join at least a dozen lawsuits filed by plaintiffs represented by Steele alleging restaurants and small businesses are violating the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Shadur called the consolidation motion “frivolous” and “thoughtless,” in part because it predicted the case would end with sanctions against Steele, whom it alleged solicited his disabled clients.

Today, Shadur granted Alexander N. Loftus, an associate at the Voelker firm, until Dec. 8 to respond to Steele’s request.

What was left unspoken in court is the relationship between Steele — who is defending himself against a seven-count complaint from the Illinois Attorney Registration & Disciplinary Commission — and the Voelker Litigation Group, which defended Steele in two cases related to that ethics complaint.

In the elevator ride after the hearing at the Dirksen Federal Courthouse, Steele commented on the history to Loftus. That Steele now opposes a law firm that used to represent him is just the latest strange twist in his career.

Starting in 2010, he filed hundreds of lawsuits accusing individuals of stealing pornography over the Internet. Steele’s firm offered to settle the cases for an amount less than the cost of defending the case in court, a trait shared by the ADA lawsuits he has filed.

Steele’s porn-related law firm, Prenda Law, unraveled when opposing counsel found evidence of a variety of misconduct. That included Prenda Law owning the copyright to porn movies it sued people for downloading; Steele stealing the identity of a man named Alan Cooper so Cooper could purport to be Prenda’s client; and, in some cases, setting up defendants with defense attorneys who agreed to take a dive.

These questions crystallized in a case before U.S. District Judge Otis D. Wright II in the Central District of California.

After Steele and his co-counsel, Paul Hansmeier, Paul Duffy and Brett Gibbs, refused to answer Wright’s questions about the allegations, the judge ordered Prenda to pay more than $80,000 in sanctions.

“There is little doubt that Steele, Hansmeier, Duffy (and) Gibbs suffer from a form of moral turpitude unbecoming of an officer of the court,” Wright wrote in that ruling, which also said he would refer the individuals to law enforcement agencies.

Duffy has since died, and this month Hansmeier was named in a disciplinary charge in Minnesota that could result, like Steele’s ARDC case, in disbarment. Steele’s ARDC case lists sanctions against the group of Prenda lawyers in excess of $1 million.

For the appeal of Wright’s order, Steele and Duffy hired Daniel J. Voelker, who once worked with Duffy at Freeborn & Peters LLP and is now the principal at Voelker Litigation Group.

In a May oral argument before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, Harry Pregerson, a 9th Circuit judge, said to Voelker, “This is going to be written about for years and years, and you’re probably going to be part of the story.”

With Prenda dissolved, Hansmeier and Steele have begun separately filing ADA complaints.

At least two local restaurants Steele sued this summer, Club Lago and Karyn’s Cooked, went on to be represented by Voelker Litigation Group. The representation raised suspicion among Internet bloggers who have covered Prenda Law for years.

That suspicion was at least in part based on Prenda’s history. In multiple cases, Prenda was accused of sending its defendants to defense lawyers who agreed to help Prenda sue others in exchange for being released from the case.

Cook County Circuit Judge Sanjay T. Tailor once asked Steele and an opposing counsel in the porn cases, “Are you two in bed together?”

But nothing about the Voelker firm’s representation has appeared favorable to Steele’s ADA causes.

In fact, it has been aggressive to make Steele look unsavory — including an appearance on WBBM-TV Channel 2 in which Loftus characterized Steele’s suits this way: “Opportunist attorneys are using these suits as a way to generate fees.”

This aggressiveness has now come at Voelker’s expense.

Shadur rebuked the firm’s effort to consolidate more than 12 ADA complaints into a single courtroom. In a hearing arguing that motion, Olga S. Dmytriyeva, a Voelker Litigation Group associate, said the move was an effort to “save money for all” the defendants.

Steele sees it differently.

“That was really an inappropriate Rule 11 motion,” he said in the lobby of the Dirksen Federal Courthouse this morning. “Let’s assume I did something wrong in the past — which I did not — how does that affect this case?”

The Voelker firm’s consolidation motion did not refer to Steele’s past. It said the cases were “specious” because of comments one of Steele’s clients made in a news report that hinted Steele may have solicited her participation.

Steele said he hasn’t spoken to Voelker “since I fired him this summer.” He said he doesn’t think Voelker’s firm’s representation of his defendants is “appropriate.”

“But I’m not the ARDC,” he added.

Steele said he thought Voelker’s firm may be representing his defendants out of bad blood stemming from the porn-related cases.

He said he does not owe Voelker any outstanding legal fees from the prior representation.

“I don’t want to say it is (bad blood), but deep down I wonder,” Steele said.

Loftus said there would be “equal vitriol” on his behalf no matter who was filing ADA cases similar to Steele’s, which he views as a shakedown.

“We make time to litigate these issues because if everyone settles short and rolls over for these guys, they’ll continue to get a bad name for other lawyers,” Loftus said.

It is unclear if Voelker’s firm’s representation could be seen as an ethics violation or a conflict of interest. Loftus said the firm no longer represents Steele in the ethics-related appeals.

James J. Grogan, deputy administrator and chief counsel of the ARDC, declined to comment on this case because of his agency’s pending charge against Steele.

But, in general, he said problems can arise in “successive representations” when an attorney uses privileged information against their former client.

“It all comes down to ‘Are the two things substantially related?’” Grogan said. “Sometimes the information acquired in the first relationship can be used against the former client in the second matter. That’s the big concern. And that’s the focus of the rule.”