This week on Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: When the Lawyer Is Fake
People put an enormous amount of trust in their lawyer. They hand over their money, their secrets, and quite often the most frightening problem of their entire life. They assume that the person on the other side of the desk actually went to law school, actually passed the bar, and actually has a licence in good standing. Most of the time that assumption is correct. Every so often it is wrong.
This week I went looking for the people who pretended. I’m not so much interested in lawyers who made mistakes or lawyers who got suspended for the usual reasons. I mean people who were never entitled to practise at all, or who lost the right years ago and simply kept going. The stories come from three different places and they share one common thread. Somebody decided that a law degree, a bar exam, and a licence were optional, and a lot of trusting people paid the price. One of them even built a courtroom!
The Courtroom That Was Not a Courtroom
We start in New York, where prosecutors say a group did not just pretend to be lawyers. They pretended to be the entire justice system.
According to the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, five people set up a fake immigration law firm with an official sounding name and went hunting for clients on social media, targeting Spanish speaking immigrants who needed help with their status. The group is accused of staging sham immigration hearings, complete with fake judges in robes and other people dressed up to look like federal officials. The hearings were held online which really facilitated this. The victims thought they were appearing before a real immigration court but it was more like a costume party.
Prosecutors say the scheme pulled in more than one hundred thousand dollars for legal advice and proceedings that did not exist. The indictment charges the five with wire fraud conspiracy, wire fraud, money laundering conspiracy, and two counts of falsely impersonating an officer of the United States. Three of the defendants were arrested at Newark airport as they tried to board a one way flight to Colombia, which is not the travel itinerary of people who expected this to end well.
Here is the part that moves the story from fraud to tragedy. At least one real victim was ordered deported because they did not show up at their actual immigration hearing. Of course they did not show up. They thought their hearing had already happened, in front of the nice judge in the robe on the screen. Somewhat surprisingly given the current environment, that removal order has since been reversed.
The Lawyer Who Was Disbarred Twenty Years Ago and Kept Practising Anyway
Our second story is quieter, and in some ways stranger, because this one really did used to be a lawyer.
In February of this year, the Supreme Court of Ohio ordered a disbarred attorney to pay a thirty thousand dollar penalty and to stop practising law. The person in question was disbarred all the way back in 2006. Yes, she lost her licence nearly twenty years ago, and the Court found that she simply carried on.
The case that brought her down was a small one. An attorney handling an estate received a phone call from a woman claiming to represent one of the beneficiaries. The handling lawyer did the one thing more people should do. She looked the caller up in the Supreme Court’s online attorney directory. There was no listing. A quick internet search turned up the truth, which was that the caller had been disbarred years earlier. The Court found that she had also prepared two property transfer deeds and notarized them herself, using a notary stamp that described her as an attorney, which she had not been for almost seventeen years.
The Court was not impressed with any suggestion that this was a well meaning person trying to help a friend. It found that she acted knowingly and deliberately, with full knowledge that she had been permanently disbarred. The penalty worked out to six thousand dollars for each of five separate acts. The lesson for the rest of us is the one the estate lawyer demonstrated for free. The directory exists, so use it.
The Disbarred Lawyer Who Just Moved States
For the third story we go to New Jersey, which shows that the Ohio case was not a one off.
The Ocean County Prosecutor’s Office announced that a fifty four year old man was charged with theft by deception and the unauthorized practice of law. The investigation found that a resident of Toms River hired him for a legal matter and paid him roughly ten thousand dollars. The problem was that he had been disbarred in New Jersey back in December of 2022. He was, prosecutors say, no longer a lawyer when he took the money and the case.
What I find notable about this one is the prosecutor’s public request at the end of the announcement. He asked anyone else who had paid this man for legal services since 2022 to come forward. When investigators have to ask the public how many other people were affected, it usually means the answer is more than one. People who hand money to a confident person in a suit rarely think to check whether the suit comes with a licence.
One More, Because It Is Too Good to Leave Out
I will close with a case that does not fit neatly with the others, because the man at the centre of it was genuinely good at the job he was not allowed to have. It made the rounds again recently and I cannot resist it.
In Kenya, a young man named Brian Mwenda was accused of representing clients in twenty six different cases and winning every single one of them, including matters before Court of Appeal and High Court judges, despite never having qualified as a lawyer. The judges did not catch him. He was undone by paperwork. There was a real, properly admitted advocate with a very similar name, and when that real lawyer tried to log into the official portal one day, he found his account had been taken over. The investigation that followed led straight to the imposter. He was arrested for impersonating an advocate.
The wacky footnote is that his perfect record actually earned him admirers. Reports at the time said a wealthy businessman offered to post his bail, apparently impressed that a man who had never seen the inside of a law school could go twenty six for twenty six in real courtrooms. I mean, a good trial record is a wonderful thing.
The Point
The people who are hurt by fake lawyers are almost never other lawyers. They are immigrants, grieving families, and ordinary people facing a problem they do not know how to solve on their own.
People don’t need to worry about whether or not I’m a lawyer. I’ve been on TV so many times with my name and the word “lawyer” on the screen. Chances are a Google image search will prove my bona fides.
See you next week.
