Dear sirs. We are a legal blog based in the New York City. One of our Nigerian investors has mysteriously passed away and left us a lot of money. We are trying to increase the number of advertisers on our site, and have a unique proposal for you. We will send you the money and then we would like you buy adds on our site. You can keep some of the money for your trouble. We only want to do this deal with the "Guest" commenter. If you are "Guest," please send us your bank details to tips@abovethelaw.com and we will send you a check.

We doubt that would work on you, oh savvy ATL readers, but it might work on Bradley Arant Boult Cummings (a firm that came out of Southern merger mania). The firm was recently taken in an e-mail scam and lost $400,000. From the ABA Journal:

The Nashville Post (sub. req.) reported yesterday that the law firm wired more than $400,000 to the foreign bank account of a scammer posing as a client. Lawyers at the firm believed the funds were covered by a check it had deposited--a check that turned out to be phony.

The law firm says it quickly reported the scam to the FBI, leading to the arrest of suspects and the freezing of the funds. "It was an elaborate criminal plan on many levels," Bradley Arant managing partner John Grenier said in a statement released to the ABA Journal. The firm quickly reported the crime, leading to "the apprehension of the suspects in this scheme and the freezing of the funds."

How did the firm get taken by the elaborate criminal plan? After the jump.

The legal profession is populated by some colorful characters -- like our latest Lawyer of the Day, Jack Tuckner. From the New York Post:

A leading lower Manhattan women's-rights lawyer watched porn at his desk, discussed his "pierced genitalia" and wears a "slave" collar at work as part of a sadomasochistic relationship with his girlfriend, a shocking sex- harassment suit alleges.

Jack Tuckner, 50, whose law firm says it's "dedicated to the empowerment of women in the workplace," is a "self-described 'testosterone-poisoned' attorney with a penchant for bondage . . . who demeaned all of the women who worked for him," says the suit.

It was filed yesterday in Manhattan Supreme Court by former office manager Lisa Brockington.

But if the slave-collar-wearing Tuckner is the "sub" in the S&M setup, doesn't that make it okay? Isn't he the one being demeaned, rather than the one doing the demeaning?

More after the jump.

In case you're wondering about the outcome, our tipster states: "Amazingly, the Judge granted the motion."

We contacted the attorney responsible for this court filing, to verify its authenticity. She responded: "Can I ask what your interest is, please, and how you acquired these?"

We're taking that as a "Yes, they're authentic." We gave the lawyer in question an opportunity to deny authenticity -- or to deny her use of a smiley-face emoticon in a court document -- and she did not.

We responded to her message, explaining that they were forwarded to us by tipsters (whose identities we always keep confidential, unless they request otherwise).

In her next email, she had a little more to say. We reprint her comments after the jump.

We have obtained a letter that Snell & Wilmer partner Tracy Fowler sent to Judge Dale Kimball (D. Utah) concerning Timestampgate.

Our source for the letter expressed the following opinion (opinion! opinion! no verifiable statement of fact!):

Attached is a letter Tracy Fowler sent to Judge Kimball explaining that he is "shocked and embarrassed" that his firm was caught for the SECOND time [allegedly] trying to deceive the court. Not surprisingly, Fowler claims to have no knowledge of what transpired and assures the court that Snell & Wilmer is undertaking a thorough investigation.

The fact that the letter came from Fowler, the partner on the case in question, rather than the managing partner of Snell & Wilmer is kind of like the fox assuring the farmer that he will conduct a thorough investigation into the hens missing from the hen house.

We hope you noticed the colorful rhetoric and hyperbole employed by our source's "hen house" comparison -- which, as noted, is merely opinion (opinion! opinion! no verifiable statement of fact!).

One could hold a very different opinion based on the same facts. For example, one could argue that it was most logical for the letter to come from Tracy Fowler, rather than some other Snell & Wilmer partner, because Fowler is lead counsel in this case.

Okay, enough preliminaries. The letter appears after the jump.

Last week, we did an item on Judge Dale Kimball (D. Utah) benchslapping some Snell & Wilmer lawyers for allegedly engaging in questionable conduct involving the court's time stamp machine and outside drop box.

Yesterday the WSJ Law Blog put up a post on the controversy. Most of their post will be familiar to readers of our earlier item. But here's a new tidbit they unearthed:

The Law Blog spoke with Alan Sullivan, managing partner of Snell & Wilmer’s Salt Lake City office, who said that his law firm took responsibility for the improperly dated court filings. He also confirmed said that a Snell & Wilmer associate staffed on the Yamaha matter resigned from the law firm on Friday.

A question: Was the associate in question entirely responsible for the alleged conduct? Or did partner Tracy Fowler, who remains at Snell & Wilmer, know anything about it?

In case you're curious, we believe that this individual is the associate who resigned last week. Her bio on the Snell & Wilmer website was functional as of Friday, but it has since been taken down. If you go to where her bio used to be, you're informed that "the current record has been deleted."

Thank God for Google Cache and Archive.org. For those of you who are curious -- nobody's forcing you to look at it -- a screenshot of this associate's bio appears after the jump.

From a correspondent in the Beehive State:

Dying for just a few extra days on that brief? Ever thought about trying to game that little date stamp machine outside the court house?

The attached order has been causing some buzz here in Salt Lake City. Judge Dale Kimball is not exactly a divo, but I love this order, not only for the slimy behavior of the Snell & Wilmer attorneys that got totally busted (check the docket for the exact attorney names), but also for the clever detective work by the court staff.

This is a good lesson. And a great example of an attorney getting benchslapped!

Here's the first page of the order:

And now it's time for this court to rip counsel a new one. The rest of order follows after the jump.

Okay, so he's actually a law student (as a number of you nitpickers would surely point out). Anyway, here's the story:

A 26-year-old law school standout was arrested for pretending to be a New Jersey congressman, so he could obtain visas for relatives and others in his native Cameroon, said a federal prosecutor.

Njock Eyong is charged with impersonating a federal official, possession of fraudulent visa documents, and fraud by wire scheme, according to an Oct. 11 indictment in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C....

While in Washington, he worked as an intern for New Jersey Democratic Rep. Donald M. Payne. In summer 2003, Eyong used the congressman's signature machines and official stationery to demand that visas be issued, said Barbara Kittay of the U.S. attorney's office in Washington.

Was Eyong's fraud hard to detect? Well, the feds knew something was up when letters like this one started emanating from Rep. Payne's office:

Dearest BELOVED:

I am BARRISTER NJOCK EYONG, Solicitor. I am the Personal Attorney to ENGR: J.M. PEDRO a national of your country, who used to work with shell development company in Bakassi CAMEROUN, who is seeking a VISA...

Student Accused Of Impersonating N.J. Congressman [CBS/AP]

Lawyers aren't that different from the rest of the country -- or, for that matter, from characters on Melrose Place (may it rest in peace). When their hearts get broken, they do some pretty crazy and stupid things.

We recently reported on a former New York litigator who forged a judge's signature after a messy divorce. And now a Baltimore litigator, to avoid getting served with divorce papers, rammed his car into the process server:

Barron Stroud Jr., a commercial litigator, had just dropped off his daughter at a Clarksville, Md., daycare center last Aug. 11 when process server James Benjamin approached his car. Benjamin told police he knocked on the driver's window, but Stroud ignored him. Benjamin said he then moved in front of the car and banged on the hood, when Stroud drove forward, hitting him in the legs. Benjamin said he took a step back, and Stroud drove into him again before fleeing the scene.

According to The Sun of Baltimore, Howard County Circuit Court Judge Lenore Gelfman said that because Stroud was in the midst of a breakup with his wife at the time, he must have known why someone was so aggressively seeking his attention; otherwise, he would have called police or stopped to find out why a man was banging on his car. He will be sentenced in October.

While we obviously can't condone such violence, we can't help but admire Stroud's lawyerly chutzpah. Trying to avoid service of process by running over the process server is kinda awful, but kinda brilliant.

Inadmissible [New Jersey Law Journal]

Sometimes smart lawyers do dumb things:

An appeals court in Brooklyn has disbarred an attorney who was convicted of criminal contempt for forging the signature of a Family Court judge during a post-divorce proceeding against her ex-husband.

A unanimous panel of the Appellate Division, Second Department, said that it could not offer a lesser sentence for the attorney, Mary K. Henning, despite her otherwise unblemished record....

Mary Henning, a former litigator at Kaplan & Winkler in White Plains, was not accused of forging the signature in her capacity as an attorney. She and her former husband, Robert A. Ritz, were divorced in 1999. In 2000, they agreed to spend equal time with their children, and Ritz signed a stipulation to that effect.

Ritz said that Judge Joan O. Cooney, the supervising judge of the family courts in the 9th Judicial District, had not signed the stipulation when it was given to him. But Henning later gave the document to school authorities as proof of residence, so she could collect a $16,750 refund for out-of-district tuition. The document had what looked like a "J" on Judge Cooney's signature line.

We'd be interested in seeing the allegedly forged document. Getting disbarred for one teensy letter -- isn't that a bit harsh? Could the "J" have been a random stray mark? Or maybe a photocopying error? As any paralegal can tell you, if you don't wipe the glass clean before copying, you will get smudges.

C'mon, Mary, think outside the box!

Panel Disbars Attorney For Forging Judge's Name [New York Law Journal]