Legal News

Swindle-Your-Law-Firm-Month Continues!

By Ashby Jones

What’s going on here? It’s only the 9th, and already we’re close to deeming September “Rip off your law firm month.”

On Tuesday, we brought you news of a scheme to defraud Wilson Sonsini out of $1 million by billing the firm for office supplies it never received.

Today’s alleged scheme strikes us as even less, uh, sophisticated: just use the firm’s credit card to help finance a side business. Not just any old side business, mind you: but one specializing in entertaining women with male exotic dancers — possibly dressed like the model pictured here. Click here for the story, from the Washington Post.

The story: A 41-year-old legal secretary at Saul Ewing was charged last week in a Washington, D.C. federal court with fraud.

She also, according to the Post, ran something called Show N Tell Entertainment, out of her home, providing “male performers exclusively for female audiences.” In court filings, an investigator wrote that the secretary organized a trip in August 2007 to the Copamarina Beach Resort in Puerto Rico so that several dozen women could be entertained by male performers. The trip was largely paid for on a credit card that had been issued to an attorney at “a firm that later merged with Saul Ewing.”

In total, prosecutors said, Richie used the card to make $46,848 in fraudulent purchases tied to the trip.

The secretary’s attorney, federal public defender Shawn Franklin Moore, declined to comment to the Post.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on September 09, 2009 (boomark / email).