By Brian Baxter, From The Am Law Daily

Three glasses of wine and some sleeping pills did not make for a restful flight from Charlotte to London for Sarah Buffett, a corporate and immigration partner at Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough.

Buffett, 41, was arrested Wednesday after she became unruly on a trans-Atlantic flight from Charlotte to London. The plane, carrying 267 passengers, was diverted over Nova Scotia after Buffett needed to be physically restrained for becoming aggressive with crew members, damaging her first-class seat and triying to break a window with a remote control for an in-flight entertainment system, according to reports by the Philadelphia Inquirer and Charlotte Observer.

The Am Law Daily contacted a Nelson Mullins spokesman and firm administrative partner and general counsel James Gray Jr. about the incident, which quickly made the rounds on legal blogs and other media, and received the following response:

“Nelson Mullins is sympathetic to the inconvenience suffered by the passengers and crew of US Airways Flight 732. While we do not know all the details yet, the firm does have an expectation of personal responsibility on the part of all our partners,” said the statement. “Nelson Mullins continues to expect the highest standards of professional behavior among all its employees. Sarah Buffett has been suspended pending an investigation.”

FlightAware, a global aviation software and data services company that tracks private and commercial aircraft on its website, has a breakdown of the wayward trajectory of US Airways Flight 732, which touched down at 4:33 a.m. EDT Wednesday in Philadelphia so Buffett could be taken into custody. (US Airways operated the flight on behalf of American Airlines—the two airlines officially merged in 2013 after a settlement with regulators.)

An affidavit by a special agent with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was attached to a criminal complaint filed with a federal court in Philadelphia against Buffett, who has been released on $50,000 bail. It states that flight crew needed the assistance of passengers to subdue Buffett (pictured right) with plastic restraints and tape following the disturbance in the first-class cabin.

The affidavit claims that Buffett told investigators that she had at least three glasses of wine and taken a Zaleplon prescription pill for insomnia. She remembered talking to a flight attendant about not being served dinner, but her next memory was of “being physically restrained by an unknown male” as the flight was diverted to Philadelphia, according to the agent’s affidavit. The flight was canceled and passengers rerouted on other flights.

An out-of-office response to an email sent to Buffett’s Nelson Mullins work account said she was out of the country on business until July 29. Her attorney, federal public defender Maria Pedraza in Philadelphia, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the charges against her client. Zaleplon, the drug Buffett claimed to have ingested, has a long list of potential side effects, according to the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

Buffett, whose biography page has been removed from Nelson Mullins’ website, joined the firm in October 2013 from North Carolina’s Moore & Van Allen. In a 2012 interview with The Mecklenburg Times of North Carolina, Buffett said her job required her to fight Homeland Security for a living. “But I don’t always win,” she said.

In another Q&A with legal newswire Law360 earlier this year, she discussed her work advising foreign and domestic clients on various immigration issues, as well as her pro bono work for the American Immigration Lawyers Association’s military assistance program.

Buffett isn’t the only Am Law 100 partner from Charlotte to run into legal trouble lately.

The Am Law Daily reported earlier this week on Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft parting ways with capital markets partner Robert Ughetta in Charlotte following a string of incidents with law enforcement.

For more on this story go to: http://www.americanlawyer.com/id=1202732900968/Nelson-Mullins-Suspends-Partner-Over-InFlight-Incident#ixzz3goxldu2Q

IMAGE: genius.com