The Hawaii Supreme Court has suspended former Bishop Estate trustee Gerard Jervis’ license to practice law in the state for six months.

The suspension begins next month — 30 days after the court’s order, dated Monday.

According to the order, Jervis violated rules of professional conduct for Hawaii lawyers regarding representing and communicating with clients in one case, and conflicts of interest in another.

Jervis could not be reached for comment.

The court said that Jervis postdated a retainer agreement with a client in a workers’ compensation claim after the client signed the document. When the agreement expired, Jervis failed to notify any of the parties, including the client, failed to tell the client of a settlement offer and failed to attend a hearing on the claim. Jervis was also derelict in his representation of the client’s civil rights discrimination claim, according to the suspension order.

In the other case, Jervis was one of two lawyers who represented a woman who as trustee had gained control of some land on Maui that was part of her parents’ trust estates. According to a lawsuit filed by the woman’s brothers, Jervis and the other lawyer were to be paid an interest in the property after it had been developed.

When the development began to fail, Jervis and the other lawyer changed their retention and fee agreement, converting a $100,000 loan Jervis received from the trust as payment for service rendered up to that point and establishing a new fee schedule, the lawsuit says.

The Supreme Court said that the terms of the loan were not fair and reasonable to the trust, that Jervis did not provide sufficient security for the loan and that the repayment terms were unclear. The court also said that Jervis failed to provide the trust with a clear explanation of the differing interests involved in amending the contingency fee agreement and relieving him of the loan repayment.

Some of the factors the high court said it considered in handing down the suspension were Jervis’ false statements during the disciplinary investigation and his one prior discipline.

Jervis resigned from the board of trustees of the multibillion-dollar Bishop Estate in 1999, five months after security guards at the Hawaii Prince Hotel found him and a female trust lawyer in a compromising situation in a stall of a men’s restroom. The morning after the two were thrown out of the hotel, the woman, who was married, was found in the garage of her Kaneohe home, dead of carbon monoxide poisoning.