How Not To Break Up With Your Law Firm

A law firm breaks up amid lurid allegations.

Making a career move and leaving an employer is fraught with difficulty even in the best of situations. When you work at a small law firm, add a dash of hurt feelings and things can get out of hand quickly.

Take, for example, the case of the law firm of Goldstein Schmitt & Associates. When named partner Thomas Schmitt decided to leave the firm, taking with him an associate and two paralegals, things started to get ugly.

The Schmitt crew allegedly took over 100 client files when they exited stage right, and that has sparked a lawsuit (against the departed as well as their new firm), as slighted former partner Lauri Goldstein argues the files belonged to the partnership, not individuals. The Daily Business Review reports:

“As the motion states, they unlawfully took the files out of the Goldstein office in an effort to bring them to their new office, which opened a few months before Mr. Schmitt and Mr. Bennett made an exodus from the Goldstein firm,” Goldstein’s attorney, Michael Pike of Pike & Lustig in West Palm Beach, said Monday.

But all of this gets only gets a “1” on the interesting meter, even when you include Goldstein’s allegation that Schmitt used operating accounts for personal expenses. After all, leaving your place of employment for a competitor keeps tons of employment lawyers flush.

Okay, now things are starting to get dirrrty:

Goldstein’s firm, now doing business as Lauri J. Goldstein & Associates, filed an emergency motion Thursday, claiming Schmitt was “in no position to represent the best interests of the former Goldstein clients due to his mental instability.”

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And just for good measure, Daily Business Review has confirmed at least some elements of Goldstein’s story. It seems Schmitt has already left his new firm amid curious circumstances:

Schmitt’s departure from Kogan DiSalvo came after his estranged wife successfully petitioned last month in Martin Circuit Court to hold her husband for an involuntary mental health examination under the Baker Act.

Public records, including a 2008 Palm Beach County sheriff’s report, show Schmitt reportedly wrestled with bipolar disorder and financial struggles, including Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 1996 and 2008.

But lest you think this dispute is all one-sided, Schmitt got some digs in during his deposition.

“I practice law,” a defiant Schmitt said during an April 3 deposition. “I don’t know what Lauri Goldstein did, but I can tell you if she practiced law, it wasn’t very much. She would come in at noon, have a two-hour lunch, shop online for a few hours and then leave.”

Sounds like a good life to me.

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This isn’t Goldstein’s first brush with controversy. She had her license suspended in 2013:

[Goldstein] was suspended by the Florida Supreme Court for 91 days in 2013. She was suspended after her firm misled a client into thinking a $5,000 settlement was reached in a restaurant slip-and-fall case when the money came from the Goldstein firm after it inadvertently missed the statute of limitations.

It’s times like these I call on the immortal words of Neil Sedaka: breaking up is hard to do.

Law Firm’s Breakup is Getting Nasty With Claims of Theft and Mental Instability Between the Partners [Daily Business Review via Morning Docket]