A government watchdog group filed a formal bar complaint on Monday calling for a disciplinary investigation into James Seth Metcalf, an Ohio attorney and former Deputy Treasurer, over his involvement in an effort to secure billions of dollars in state pension assets for his startup.
The complaint, submitted by Campaign for Accountability to the Office of Disciplinary Counsel of the Supreme Court of Ohio, follows a February bench trial in the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas. In that ruling, Judge Karen Held Phipps found that two board members of the State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio breached their fiduciary duties by acting as “mere puppets” for Metcalf and his business partner.
Metcalf served as Deputy Treasurer and Executive Counsel to former Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel before co-founding QED Technologies with Jonathan Tremmel. In May 2024, former Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost filed a lawsuit against STRS board members Wade Steen and Rudy Fichtenbaum.
The suit alleged the two worked to steer approximately 70 percent of the system’s $91 billion portfolio to QED, a firm that lacked clients, a track record, registration with the SEC or FINRA, and direct ownership of the technology it pitched.
Internal STRS staff opposed the venture, and an independent vetting consultant, Cliffwater LLC, advised the board against hiring QED.
According to trial records, text messages and document metadata showed Metcalf ghostwriting internal board memos, emails, motions, and talking points for Steen and Fichtenbaum. Records also revealed Metcalf communicated with Steen during live board meetings and received confidential STRS documents. Under cross-examination during the trial, Metcalf testified that he had been “writing content as though I am Mr. Steen.”
On February 18, 2026, Judge Phipps ruled that Steen and Fichtenbaum “essentially act[ed] as agents for their undisclosed principals: QED, Metcalf, and Tremmel.” The court permanently barred both members from STRS service and removed the sitting board chair. Metcalf was not named as a defendant in that lawsuit, and the judge issued no ruling on his personal liability.
Campaign for Accountability’s complaint alleges Metcalf’s actions breached Ohio Rules of Professional Conduct 8.4(c), which prohibits dishonest or deceitful conduct, and 8.4(h), which addresses conduct reflecting adversely on a lawyer’s fitness to practice.
“Half a million Ohio teachers and retirees trusted the STRS board to safely manage their retirement savings, but an Ohio court found that two of its members were taking direction from the very people angling to get their hands on those assets,” Michelle Kuppersmith, executive director of Campaign for Accountability, said in a statement. “Mr. Metcalf ghostwrote their memos, scripted their questions, fed them motions to make from the dais, and moved the conversation onto an auto-deleting messaging app. His actions seem at odds with bar rules prohibiting conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation.”
Kuppersmith added: “A board weighing whether to hand over billions of dollars in beneficiary assets has an obvious right to know who is making the arguments before them: their own fiduciaries or the people trying to win the business. The Ohio Disciplinary Counsel should investigate whether Mr. Metcalf’s deception violated bar rules.”
The Office of Disciplinary Counsel has not yet announced whether it will open a formal proceeding into the matter.
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