The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times

Ex-D.C. Law Firm Business Manager Sentenced for Stealing

The former business manager of a Washington law firm was sentenced yesterday to serve 18 months in prison for stealing more than $730,000 from the firm.

William McNichols, 48, worked from 2001 to 2011 as the finance and business manager at Trister, Ross, Schadler & Gold. From August 2004 to March 2011, prosecutors said, McNichols embezzled more than $630,000 from Trister and $101,000 from the Ross Yoon Agency, which was affiliated with the firm.

McNichols pleaded guilty to one count of mail fraud in March. Yesterday, U.S. District Judge Robert Wilkins sentenced him to serve 18 months in prison and ordered him to pay back money he stole. After he is released, McNichols will spend three years on supervised release.

Former Patton Boggs Partner Sues Firm Over Discrimination

Updated 6/14/13 at 3:16 p.m.

Roy Lessy, a former partner at Patton Boggs, is suing the firm for discrimination, claiming he was treated unfairly and not paid money he was owed after he resigned because he had a disability.

Lessy, 69, worked at the firm for nearly seven years before he resigned in mid-2011. In a lawsuit filed yesterday in District of Columbia Superior Court, he accused the firm of failing to adjust his compensation formula to take his disability into account and, after he left, of wrongfully refusing to return money he contributed to the firm when he was first hired as promised.

Lessy, who is retired, and his attorney, Harvey Levin of Thompson Coburn, declined to comment.

Steptoe Team Represents D.C. Council Member in Bribery Case

Updated 2:33 p.m.

A team from Steptoe & Johnson LLP is representing former D.C. Council member Michael A. Brown in a bribery case prosecutors filed today in Washington federal district court.

Brown, formerly an elected at-large member of the D.C. Council, in January agreed to a $55,000 cash bribe from undercover FBI agents who were posing as officials from a company whose identity isn't disclosed in court papers. Brown lost his re-election bid in January.

Prosecutors, including assistant U.S. attorneys Michael Atkinson, David Last and Anthony Saler, said in the one-count information that Brown agreed to the bribe "in return for being influenced in the performance of an official act."

The government lawyers said Brown offered to provide assistance to "Company M" to get contracts in Washington and to obtain approval as a Certified Business Enterprise from the D.C. Department of Small and Local. Brown will plead guilty to the bribery charge. U.S. District Judge Robert Wilkins has set a plea hearing for June 10.

Audit Finds Problems with U.S. Marshals Service in D.C.

Updated at 3:32 p.m.

A recent audit of the U.S. Marshals Service office that serves the District of Columbia Superior Court identified a series of problems with management of salaries and overtime, procurement and property control, the U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General said in a new report.

The investigation found the marshals office was too reliant on overtime to staff the courthouse cellblock. Other problems included criminal investigators not working as many hours as they were required to by the Justice Department; a lack of reporting on how employees were using government credit cards; and inadequate policies for tracking weapons stolen from the service.

Investigators found $275,000 in "unsupported costs," which included salaries and credit cards that were supposed to be used for gas and services on government vehicles and other job-related expenses. From 2008 to 2011, about 10 percent of the 1.5 million hours worked by service employees was overtime, resulting in $6 million in overtime pay. The audit found several employees who reported at least 1,000 hours in annual overtime.

Ex-Booz Allen Lawyer Sues for Discrimination

A former longtime lawyer at Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. is suing the consulting firm for discrimination, claiming the company unjustifiably demoted her and eventually forced her to resign because of her age and gender.

The plaintiff, Carla Calobrisi, joined Booz Allen's law department in 2000 at the age of 44, according to the complaint she filed Friday in District of Columbia Superior Court. After several years as a senior associate in the company's law department she was promoted to principal, and said she always received positive performance reviews. However, she said younger male colleagues were given preferable treatment and there was a "glass ceiling" in the law department and throughout the company preventing women over 40 from advancing.

Booz Allen is already fighting two separate discrimination lawsuits in Superior Court filed by former female partners. In those cases, the plaintiffs accused the company of actively denying women opportunities to move up to top leadership positions.

Federal Public Defenders Facing More Furlough Days

Updated 5/30/13 at 9:02 a.m.

A committee of judges tasked with deciding how the federal judiciary spends its money announced in mid-April that federal defenders wouldn't face more than 15 furlough days under mandatory budget cuts. Less than a month later, however, the committee alerted defender offices it had raised the maximum furlough time to 20 days.

The change wasn't publicly announced. According to a May 10 memorandum sent by Chief Judge William Traxler Jr., chairman of the Executive Committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States, the committee reconsidered its April decision after getting new information on how defender offices were coping with the cuts, also known as sequestration.

The new furlough plan meant lawyers and staff in the D.C. federal public defender office faced a month of mandatory unpaid leave—20 work days—as opposed to three weeks. The change was preferable to the 27 furlough days the office originally faced under sequestration, said Federal Public Defender A.J. Kramer, but he said they were disappointed.

Law Firms Raise $3.6 Million for D.C. Civil Legal Services

Judge David Tatel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit made an impassioned plea yesterday for law firms to take more responsibility for the welfare of civil legal services groups, lamenting the small percentage of the legal industry's billion-dollar revenues that go to financially-strapped providers.

Tatel spoke at an event honoring 36 law firms that contributed $3.6 million last year to local civil legal services through the D.C. Access to Justice Commission's second annual Raising the Bar in D.C. Campaign. Firms were honored based on the percentage of annual D.C. office revenues donated to legal services; the number of participating firms in 2012 was up from the 23 that participated in 2011.

Tatel praised the private bar's efforts to assist their colleagues in civil legal services, but warned the challenges facing individuals who can't afford a lawyer "is only getting worse." In the District of Columbia, for instance, he noted that more than 90 percent of litigants are unrepresented in certain types of civil cases.

Supreme Court Declines Review of Judicial Pay Case

By Marcia Coyle

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear the government's appeal of a decision finding that Congress violated the compensation clause when it withheld cost of living salary adjustments for federal judges in the 1990s and in 2007 and 2010.

The denial of review in U.S. v. Beer ended litigation that had roots more than three decades ago.

The en banc U.S.. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled last fall that a 1989 law prevented Congress from abrogating the law 's "precise and definite commitment" to automatic yearly cost of living adjustments for sitting members of the judiciary. The appellate court ruling is here.

Check back in later for an update on today's Supreme Court action.

On Gideon's 50th, Lawyers Lament Lack of Access to Justice

Updated 4/22/13 at 9:04 a.m.

The District of Columbia is home to what's widely considered the gold-standard of local public defender offices, but a panel of right-to-counsel advocates today challenged the courts and the criminal justice community not to grow complacent.

"D.C. is a place where the expectations are incredibly high, and they should be," said Jonathan Rapping, a former local public defender who founded Gideon's Promise, an Atlanta-based organization that supports public defender offices in southern states. When it came to ensuring access to justice, he urged local attorneys and judges to ask among themselves, "What else can we do?"

Rapping was part of a panel today during the annual joint session of the Judicial Conference of the District of Columbia and the D.C. Bar. The theme of this year's bench-bar conference was access to counsel, in light of the 50th anniversary of Gideon v. Wainwright, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that secured the right to counsel for criminal defendants.

U.S. Courts Announce Sequestration Plan for Defenders

Updated at 5:35 p.m.

It's rare for a furlough announcement to be considered good news, but that was the case yesterday for the federal public defender office in Washington.

The Executive Committee of the Judicial Conference, the body of judges that decides how the federal judiciary spends its money, announced it had reached a plan for the defender services budget under federally mandated cuts known as sequestration. The details are still being hammered out, but federal public defender offices would face no more than three weeks of furloughs—a significant amount of time, but less than originally projected for many offices.

The D.C. federal public defender's office faced 27 furlough days under sequestration. Federal Public Defender A.J. Kramer said today that the announcement was "welcome news." Still, he said that until the final details are worked out and they know exactly how many furlough days attorneys and staff will have to take, "you don't count on anything until it's done."