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Criminal Justice

Former Girardi Keese CFO ordered to pay over $8.9M in restitution, serve prison time for embezzlement

By Debra Cassens Weiss

April 15, 2025, 11:32 am CDT

The former chief financial officer for the now-defunct law firm Girardi Keese was sentenced Friday to 121 months in federal prison for embezzling money from the firm and its clients.

Christopher Kazuo Kamon, 51, was also ordered to pay more than $8.9 million in restitution, according to a April 11 press release. He had pleaded guilty in October 2024 to two counts of wire fraud in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.

U.S. District Judge Josephine L. Staton of the Central District of California said during the sentencing hearing that Kamon helped build a “web of deceit and manipulation.” Kamon had worked closely with former name partner Tom Girardi, who was convicted in August 2024 on four counts of wire fraud for or stealing $15 million from four clients over the course of a decade.

Girardi, who has been disbarred, was famous for his legal team’s portrayal in the film Erin Brockovich and for his marriage to Erika Girardi, who has appeared on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills reality TV show.

Law360, Law.com and Reuters are among the publications with coverage of Kamon’s sentence.

During the hearing, Staton described the relationship between Kamon and Girardi as “symbiotic,” according to Law.com.

According to Law.com, “Staton’s voice shook slightly as she described, in detail, the disastrous financial situations of two of Girardi’s injured clients: a family who, as a result of Girardi’s main fraud scheme, was unable to purchase a house large enough to house the equipment necessary to care for their quadriplegic child and a widowed client who—after being assured by the firm that her embezzled settlement would pay off her house—was later forced to take out a home equity loan and sell it.”

Kamon is also facing federal charges in Illinois for allegedly stealing money from relatives of air crash victims. Kamon’s lawyer, Michael Severo, told Law360 that a nearly finalized plea deal would allow Kamon to serve his sentence in the Illinois case concurrently with the California sentence.

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The U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board has temporarily blocked President Donald Trump‘s firings of approximately 5,900 probationary employees at the U.S. Department of Agriculture who have been booted since he took office in January.

In a stay issued on Wednesday by embattled MSPB member Cathy Harris, who has been fighting for her job herself, the board condemned the terminations as “planned eliminations” and violations of “personnel practice.”

“I find that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the agency engaged in a prohibited personnel practice,” Harris wrote in the MSPB order, noting how Biden ethics enforcer Hampton Dellinger — who is battling Trump’s Justice Department in federal court over his firing at the Office of Special Counsel — provided findings from an OSC investigation on the USDA removals this week that “reasonably” alleges and outlines personnel violations by the Trump administration.

Harris said the board believed there were “reasonable grounds” to stay the firings for 45 days while MSPB members continue to investigate, on account of there being so many people involved.

“Because there is a possibility that additional individuals, not specifically named in the agency’s response, may be affected by these probationary terminations, and given the assertions made in OSC’s initial stay request and the deference to which we afford OSC in the context of an initial stay request, I find that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the agency terminated the aforementioned probationary employees in violation of (civil service laws),” Harris explained.

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Consumer Law

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau employees ordered to ‘stand down’

By Debra Cassens Weiss

February 13, 2025, 9:46 am CST

Employees at an agency established to protect consumers against wrongdoing by financial institutions have been ordered to “stand down” and stop activities, leading to the resignations of top officials.

The employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau got the directives in a series of emails beginning last weekend from Russell Vought, the acting CFPB director, and from Mark Paoletta, the chief legal officer at the Office of Management and Budget, report Bloomberg Law and Law360 (here and here).

Employees were ordered to stay away from the agency’s Washington, D.C., headquarters for a week. There are new enforcement priorities, staff members were told, and attempts to move forward on cases would be considered “insubordination.”

Vought also revealed that he would not seek funding from the Federal Reserve for the next quarter.

“The moves appear to be a prelude to essentially shuttering the CFPB, following a playbook that was deployed to stop operations at the U.S. Agency for International Development,” Bloomberg Law reports.

Lorelei Salas, the CFPB’s supervision director, and Eric Halperin, the CFPB’s enforcement director, resigned Tuesday, citing an inability to do their jobs, Law60 reports in another story.

The orders “left in limbo” significant cases that began in the Biden administration, Reuters reports. They include lawsuits accusing Capital One of misleading consumers about savings accounts, accusing Walmart of forcing delivery drivers to use accounts with junk fees to get paid, and accusing banks of failing to protect consumers from fraud on the Zelle payment network.

The union that represents CFPB employees has filed two suits, Axios reports. One challenges the stop-work directive, while the other seeks to block access to employee information by the Department of Government Efficiency.

President Donald Trump has named Jonathan McKernan, a board member of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., to serve as the CFPB’s new director, the New York Times reports. Bartlett Naylor, a financial policy advocate for Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer rights advocacy group, said in a statement McKernan has “a history of serving senators bent on hobbling the CFPB.”

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who is leading the Department of Government Efficiency, celebrated on his social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

“CFPB RIP,” he wrote after Vought’s appointment as interim chief, adding an emoji of a tombstone.

The Washington Post and the New York Times point out that Musk is building a new digital wallet called X Money that will allow X users to send money to others. Such payment platforms “have come under intense scrutiny by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,” the New York Times reports.

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Ethics

Lawyers ordered to provide door-to-door apology after their early-morning ‘scream test’

By Debra Cassens Weiss

October 14, 2024, 11:27 am CDT

Lawyers who wakened South Philadelphia residents with a looped recording of a screaming woman to prove a point in a lawsuit must go door to door to issue in-person apologies, a federal judge has ruled.

In an Oct. 10 opinion, U.S. District Judge John F. Murphy of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania said lawyers for former inmate Termaine Hicks will have to mail written apologies to nearby residents. At least one lawyer will have to go door to door to apologize to those living closest to the recording.

Law.com and Law360 have coverage, while Courthouse News Service published a brief summary and linked to the decision by Murphy.

The 122-decibel recording broadcast for more than an hour beginning at 5:30 a.m. Sept. 23. That volume is “somewhere on the border between uncomfortable and painful and is similar to an ambulance siren, a rock concert or a chainsaw,” Murphy wrote.

Hicks was suing several police officers and the city of Philadelphia for allegedly framing him for a rape. He was imprisoned for 19 years until his conviction was vacated in December 2020.

Hicks had claimed that he heard a woman screaming in the early-morning hours of Nov. 27, 2001, and he went to help. She had been sexually assaulted and was lying on the ground.

According to Hicks, police arrived, shot him three times in the back and planted a gun to frame him for the crime. One issue is whether Hicks could have heard the woman screaming from two blocks away.

Lawyers for the defendants had tried to show that Hicks didn’t hear the screams by hiring an acoustics expert who played a “siren chirp” in the neighborhood. Attorneys for Hicks retained an expert who devised a “scream test.”

The plaintiff’s attorneys had been instructed not to speak directly to city employees and had assumed that the defendants’ counsel would contact police and take necessary precautions.

Police were notified.

“What is clear is that no one provided community members with notice of the scream test,” wrote Murphy, who also had no notice of the plan.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs acknowledged that “residents were clearly upset,” Murphy said. One man came over with a baseball bat. A woman yelled at the acoustics expert. Many wanted to know who was responsible for the recorded scream and asked whom they could contact to complain.

“At best, this lack of forethought and sensitive judgment resulted in a deeply disturbing and potentially dangerous situation,” Murphy wrote. “At worst, it undermined the local community’s confidence in the exact justice system that Mr. Hicks relies on for recourse.”

Murphy decided against withholding the “scream test” evidence as a sanction, citing three reasons. The plaintiff’s counsel did not act maliciously, there is no apparent prejudice to the defendants, and banning the evidence “would have misplaced effects,” Murphy said.

“Such an action would benefit defense counsel, who were present for the scream test and at least complicit in allowing the test to move forward,” he said.

Lawyer Emma Freudenberger of the law firm Neufeld Scheck Brustin Hoffmann & Freudenberger took personal responsibility for what happened, Murphy said in a footnote. The judge allowed any lawyer for the plaintiffs to conduct the in-person apologies, however.

Law360 reported that two firms represented the plaintiff. The second is Kairys Rudovsky Messing Feinberg & Lin. Freudenberger and other lawyers for the firms did not immediately reply to an ABA Journal email seeking comment.

The case is Hicks v. City of Philadelphia.

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3. Pro se litigant and lawyer ordered to pay…

Law Firms

Pro se litigant and lawyer ordered to pay $1.5M for using Lewis Brisbois name

By Debra Cassens Weiss

September 17, 2024, 3:05 pm CDT

Updated: A federal judge in Houston has ordered a lawyer and a pro se litigant in a rental-fee and eviction dispute to pay $1.5 million for registering a Texas business using the name of Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith, the law firm representing their litigation opponent in the rental litigation.

U.S. District Judge Keith P. Ellison of the Southern District of Texas ordered pro se litigant Michael Bitgood to pay $1 million and lawyer Susan C. Norman, who represented a second litigant in the rental dispute, to pay $500,000, Law360 reports. Another lawyer, Bradley B. Beers, was ordered to pay $10,000 for filing an assumed name certificate that registered the new entity with the Texas secretary of state’s office.

Bitgood and Norman filed documents to register a partnership and assume the Lewis Brisbois name after they saw an online notice reflecting that the firm’s registration for a foreign limited liability partnership in Texas had lapsed. After taking on the Lewis Brisbois name, Bitgood and Norman alleged that the Lewis Brisbois lawyer representing their opponent in the rental litigation no longer had the right to appear in a Texas court. The gambit worked.

Lewis Brisbois sued in September 2022 for alleged trademark infringement, unfair competition and fraud. Ellison issued a preliminary injunction in February 2023 that was upheld in an unpublished July 31 opinion by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at New Orleans.

Ellison granted a motion for summary judgment Aug. 14, a permanent injunction Sept. 6 and assessed damages Sept. 13.

Ellison’s summary judgment opinion found for Lewis Brisbois on the trademark infringement and unfair competition claims. He also said Lewis Brisbois was entitled to attorney fees, which are allowed in Lanham Act trademark cases that are “exceptional.”

“If any Lanham Act case is exceptional, it is this one,” Ellison wrote. “Defendants have filed dozens of frivolous motions and delayed the proceedings for months.”

In a footnote, Ellison said the filing of frivolous motions was “most egregious” in Bitgood’s case because he had filed 65 motions and documents after being granted access to the PACER filing system.

“This court has had complex, multiyear class actions require far fewer filings than this straightforward infringement case,” Ellison wrote.

Norman and Beers did not immediately respond to the ABA Journal’s email and voicemail messages seeking comment.

Bitgood told the Journal in an email that, “No, I do not have $1 million laying around” to pay the judgment. He elaborated in a phone interview.

“Not only is it unfair, it’s outrageous,” Bitgood says of the damages order. Lewis Brisbois “didn’t suffer a penny’s worth of damages; they incurred no attorneys fees,” he says.

Bitgood says he sought to use the Lewis Brisbois name “for the heck of it,” but his quest turned out to be successful because he “whipped” Lewis Brisbois when he disqualified the firm in the rental dispute.

“I beat them fair and square in state court,” he says.

Bitgood says he told Ellison in an Oct. 6, 2022, hearing, which was less than a month into the trademark lawsuit, that he had no interest in fighting the trademark case and didn’t want to use the Lewis Brisbois name.

“Who wants a name like that with their reputation anyway?” Bitgood says.

Additional demands, however, for a reversal of the rental decision and indemnity led Bitgood, in his words, to tell Lewis Brisbois to, “Blow it out your a- -; there is no way I’m going to do all that.”

As for Ellison’s allegations that Bitgood filed frivolous motions, Bitgood says the judge should specify which motions he thought were frivolous and what law supported his conclusion. And he should have a hearing to refute the allegations, Bitgood says.

Because he indicated early on that he was willing to give up the name, Bitgood says, “What are we fighting about?”

Updated Sept. 17 at 3:37 p.m. to add comments from pro se litigant Michael Bitgood.