Small Law Firms

The Answer To The Question 'How Much Money Can You Steal From Clients Before Getting Caught' Is A Terrifyingly High Number

Stealing from widows and orphans. It's not just a cliché about lawyers anymore!

By  
on

Hopefully this isn’t a question you’ve ever pondered seriously, because that would be wrong, but if you’ve even entertained a fleeting, academic interest in knowing exactly how far a lawyer entrusted with client funds could rip them off, New Jersey has the answer for you.

Yesterday, Joseph Talafous Jr., a 55-year-old now-former attorney, was convicted on 17 counts of a litany of crimes that all boil down to “taking money from clients that he wasn’t supposed to.” Talafous, disbarred in 2015, now faces 5 to 10 years, though he proclaims his innocence and intends to appeal.

So how much did he take according to this case? By our rough estimation, somewhere north of $1.5 million. There was the investment account of the elderly woman pilfered under a power of attorney agreement, the $461,000 liberated from a trust set up for an orphaned child,[1] $300,000 taken from the estate of a woman who died without immediate family, $400,000 from the estate of a guy whose immediate family hired Talafous, and $330,000 from a portfolio of property investments in the estate of a woman Talafous counseled. That’s quite the illicit haul and basically suggests that far too many people are capable of misplacing $300K without noticing.

“This verdict sends a strong message that lawyers who abuse their licenses and break the law will face stern punishment,” Director Elie Honig of the Division of Criminal Justice said in a statement. “We will not tolerate lawyers who steal from their clients.”

Indeed. New Jersey has a firm cut-off at $1.5 million.

In all seriousness, catching lawyers who steal funds they’re supposed to be managing is a difficult task. More often than not, lawyers hold all the cards and have the savvy to cover their tracks — at least from the notice of clients who more than likely hired a lawyer simply so they wouldn’t have to watch their resources like hawks. An attorney nabbing smaller sums could get away with it for some time, unfortunately.

In the meantime, we really only have two recourses to address this kind of behavior: the lawyer’s sense of professional ethics and the likelihood that lawyer’s greed will get the better of them. It seems that in New Jersey, the latter got someone caught.

Sponsored

Disbarred Lawyer Is Convicted in Theft of $1.5M From Clients [New Jersey Law Journal]

[1] The boy’s father died in a workplace accident. This kicked off a spirited discussion (read: actual yelling) in the Above the Law offices over whether or not “orphaned” is properly used to describe that situation. While the term is commonly used for the situation where both parents have died and the child is sent to an orphanage, it’s technically correct whenever one parent dies. So it is entirely correct to say this case is about stealing from widows and orphans.

HeadshotJoe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.

Sponsored

Topics

,