Fraudster Tom Girardi Caught Red-Handed—Bravo!

Episode Notes

Transcript

Maggie Mendenhall Casey:

Hello everyone and welcome to the CBA’s @theBar podcast where we have unscripted conversations with our guests about legal news, topics, stories, and whatever else strikes our fancy. I’m your host, Maggie Mendenhall Casey of the city of Chicago’s law department, and joining me as a co-host is my girl, Tracy Brammeier, of the Clifford Law Offices. Tracy, I’m excited to be on the mic with you.

Tracy Brammeier:

Me too. My first episode, thanks for welcoming me in.

Maggie Mendenhall Casey:

Of course. It’s going to be a fun discussion and part of that fund is going to be our guest today, Jay Edelson, founder and CEO of Edelson PC at plaintiff’s firm focusing on class mass and government actions. He has been named as a titan of the plaintiff’s bar noted for his creative and disruptive approach to plaintiff’s litigation in 2024. Ford named him to its inaugural 200 Lawyers in America List. His firm has secured over 4 billion in verdicts, in settlements as lead counsel with a total of over 45 billion. Thanks for agreeing to chat with us today, Jay.

Jay Edelson:

I’m so glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me on.

Maggie Mendenhall Casey:

Of course.

Tracy Brammeier:

And Jay, you have such an impressive background, but I saw on your website profile you only drink two cups of coffee per day. So is that true, and if so, what is your secret?

Jay Edelson:

No, that’s a complete lie right now. I already had a coffee and I’m on a venti mocha, so I think that was put in a few years ago when I was focused more on health and even then I was having two cups of coffee.

Tracy Brammeier:

Okay,

Maggie Mendenhall Casey:

So I see you sipping on what looks like fresh press, orange juice right now. So you certainly told on yourself you appear to be living that clean life and that’s what we’re going to stick with Jay.

Tracy Brammeier:

Glad to know you’re human like the rest of us.

Maggie Mendenhall Casey:

So we could talk all day about the important cases you’ve been involved with, but we wanted to hear specifically about your role and take on the Tom Girardi case. Tom Girardi was a lawyer who’s probably most famous for Aaron Brockovich case, which was turned into a movies I think in the nineties, but he’s had Julia Roberts. Right, exactly. Thank you. You have to mention that Ms. Julia Roberts was the star of the movie, but Tom has had a long or had we’ll get more into that, a long and successful career as a plaintiff’s lawyer in Los Angeles. I personally am a humongous fan of Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise, and so I personally knew of Tom as the husband to Beverly Hills housewife, Erica Jane, and on television we got to see that Tom was funding Erica’s private planes, her design wardrobe in her fledgling career as a pop star. Tracy, do you want to give us your take on what was happening in the background with Tom?

Tracy Brammeier:

Absolutely. So I am not a Bravo Real Housewives fan, but having worked on the 7 37 max litigation, the two Boeing crashes I heard right away when at the end of 2020, in December, 2020, it was revealed that Tom Girardi had been embezzling his client’s funds in that case, and in July, 2022, he was disbarred by the state of California until in August, 2024, he was convicted of wire fraud for stealing more than $15 million from his clients in what was essentially a Ponzi scheme that spanned over the course of a decade, Tom’s crimes were exposed by Jay and his firm, which was working at the time with Tom Girardi representing victims in that litigation against the Boeing Company for the crash of Lion Air Flight, JT six 10 in Indonesia. Jay, can you tell us what was your involvement with Tom and his firm in the Boeing litigation? Give us some background about your relationship.

Jay Edelson:

Sure. Well, first and most importantly, I need to respond to Maggie. I’m recovering Bravo fan after getting to know Erica Jane A. Little bit more, who was my favorite real housewife. I’ve had to switch to even worse reality tv, blow deck, things like that. It’s been one of the biggest losses of my life.

Maggie Mendenhall Casey:

That’s why they say never meet your idols. Right? Never

Jay Edelson:

Meet your idols. It’s really true because when I was starting to go to law school and becoming a lawyer, there were a number of plaintiff’s lawyers who I really looked up to, and for silly reasons, they wrote a book. And so I assumed that meant that they were terrific and some are like Jerry Spence, I read his book, I really looked up to him and Tom Girardi, I bought into the movie magic and I was like, wow, this is someone who’s really positively impacted a community. And I always had that in my head like, this is what a top plaintiff’s lawyer is. And then as you said, Maggie, never meet your idols because things changed pretty quickly. Tracy, in terms of your question, we had not worked with him or his firm before. Some of his younger partners asked us to be local counsel in the Indonesia cases, and we were happy to do that. We thought it’d be interesting to work with Tom and his firm and they were important cases and we thought that we could add some value because of some of the legal issues that were going on, and we thought we had pretty good handle on those.

Tracy Brammeier:

So did you start working with him then in 2018, early 2019, something like that

Jay Edelson:

With his firm? Tom was not actually actively involved in those cases. His primary role was stealing the money and he kind of stayed in his lane.

Tracy Brammeier:

We’re definitely going to talk about that in detail. So what was the working relationship like with his firm, I guess up until of course it wasn’t?

Jay Edelson:

Yeah, so I have so much contempt for his firm that it’s hard for me to be unbiased, but they were fine. It was a weird firm in that they were so technologically incompetent that it felt like we were dealing with a firm that was stuck in the seventies or eighties. So at one point they asked us, how do you do a red line on Microsoft Word? And we’re like, Microsoft Word has the bill. Oh no. They said, what file do we download in order to get a red line on Microsoft Word? So we took them through that. Yeah, that was the level it was at. That’s not to take away from the fact that a lot of them are or were good trial lawyers, but they were not very tech savvy. They weren’t super focused on the legal issues. That was fine. We viewed that as a little bit more our role than theirs.

Maggie Mendenhall Casey:

So Jay, you mentioned that Tom stayed in his lane converting client funds and you generally did not interact with him. Was there any allegation that the rest of the firm was involved or was this solely pinned on Tom?

Jay Edelson:

Oh no. I mean the people who we worked with were constantly lying to us once we had some concerns that the money wasn’t going to the clients. We spoke with David Lira and Keith Griffin, I know I’m not supposed to name names, David Lira and Keith Griffin. David Lira has also been indicted and the trial’s going to be beginning of next year. Keith Griffin, I think, got a target notice To me, the firm was rotten. This wasn’t a decade long cotton scheme. We think it was about 30 years, and we think he stole hundreds of millions of dollars. So at a small firm like that, it’s little bit hard to even conceptualize. Other people wouldn’t know about it. But also we have documentary evidence where David Lear is saying things like, oh, he’s up to this again. The clients are going to figure it out this time. So yeah, we think the whole firm is dirty.

Maggie Mendenhall Casey:

And when did it transition from their issues with redlining? These are old school guys that don’t know how to operate technology to, we believe that there is something seriously rotten happening over at this firm, Gerard and Keys.

Jay Edelson:

So probably about middle of 2020 we’d settled the cases. We weren’t getting paid the local counsel fee that was promised. Our view was it’s not that big a deal. A lot of plaintiff’s firms like to not really pay other plaintiff’s firms, and you kind of figure it out. And we kept saying to ’em, if you want to pay us at the end of the year or beginning of next year for whatever reason, that’s fine. And they just kept alluding us. And then at some point we said, is there actually a chance that the money is gone? And it didn’t go to the clients during that time. This was Covid was happening. Tom had a lot of excuses, some which made sense to us. Since they’re not a technological savvy firm, the fact that they would struggle during Covid to keep their business kind of pointing in the right direction wasn’t a surprise, but he had like six other excuses too, eye cancer, which was true. There were tax issues which was false, and which he used over and over again with other clients. The documents needed to be translated into Indonesian. We weren’t sure if he was just trying to steal from us or the clients. And then we figured it out. I think it was late November when we really felt like maybe this is happening.

Tracy Brammeier:

So can you tell us what you did at that time, what action you took and what the reaction was?

Jay Edelson:

So to understand my state of mind, the firm’s state of mind, none of it really made sense because we viewed Tom as someone who’s made hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in his career. The idea that he would steal a few million dollars from widows and orphans, it didn’t compute. I’m not saying that we thought he was the best guy ever, but it’s like I’m not a fan of Elon Musk. I wouldn’t think Elon Musk is stealing a couple million dollars from widows and orphans. He’s got tons of money. So even when we filed and we had the goods, we were really concerned about what the reaction was going to be. We were accusing one of the legends of the plaintiff’s bar of criminal activity. What we did was we spoke with Keith. I spoke with Keith and said, look, we’re going to file this thing.

If we’re wrong, now’s the time to tell us because we don’t want to be wrong. And he did more in misdirection. The best thing we did in filing was we had seen that there were some other lawsuits against Tom over misappropriation of client funds. They never went anywhere. They were all filed in California and he had tremendous influence in California. So the best thing we did was we filed a motion for contempt in the Lion Air case in the northern district of Illinois. And as both of you know, what’s great about Chicago judges is they don’t care who you are at all. Judge Durkin did not care. Tracy, I see you’re smiling.

Tracy Brammeier:

He’s not afraid of anybody.

Jay Edelson:

Exactly. And we got on and he said, I want to understand Mr. ARDI’s position. And his lawyer said, yeah, he’s going to take the fifth. And then Durkin took total control of this.

Tracy Brammeier:

So we’re going to talk a little bit more about that hearing. I think that’s kind of the culmination of this whole saga. But I’m curious at what point you, Jay became involved in all of this and had direct conversations with Tom versus people at your firm who I assume you weren’t doing the day-to-Day work on all this.

Jay Edelson:

I was involved in the negotiations for the clients, but no, the Onte number of calls thinking we weren’t paid, I wasn’t involved in that.

Tracy Brammeier:

Sure.

Jay Edelson:

I was kept in the loop. I didn’t feel a need to talk to Tom directly. By that time was clear he was a liar. So I spoke to Keith and I thought there was less chance Keith would lie. Now, Tom did call me after we filed Summit was on recordings where he said, if you drop this, you’ll be tied to the hip with me and California and I’ll make you another million dollars. I’m just just the sleaziest guy. I did speak to him at one point and I said, Tom, do you know how much money you stole? And he goes, 500. And I said, from how many clients? And he said four. That was $2 million total, which was the amount that we understood he had stolen, which made it clear to me that this wasn’t something that someone else did. Tom knew exactly what he had done. That was an eye opening conversation. I responded to him, well, well, you’re in big trouble. And he said, well, given that I’m going to get off the phone. And that’s the last time we spoke.

Tracy Brammeier:

And that was after you filed?

Jay Edelson:

It was right after we filed.

Tracy Brammeier:

So I had noticed in your filings that you, I think understandably included a lot of factual background and detail about what had occurred, but it seemed like you had also done a substantial amount of your own investigation into Tom and his history of financial mismanagement. At what point during all of this, did you realize that this was a bigger problem than just the clients that you were working with him?

Jay Edelson:

I did not understand the scope of the problem until a lot later. We started dealing with the California bar and asking them to investigate some of the other partners at the firm. Their responses were crazy. Their responses were everything from we don’t investigate criminal behavior, which is absurd to we’re going to start focusing on you if you keep pushing, which is insane. And then we found out that he had been bribing some of the investigators in the California bar for decades. He had gotten hundreds of bar complaints and they were just sweeping him under the rug at that point. We said, oh my goodness, this is not something where he just got in financial trouble in the last few years. He’s been doing this throughout his career and we understand he even did it to Aaron Brock, Fitch clients, or at least they claim that. So it’s been a really unbelievable experience to understand this guy who I grew up kind of idolizing his whole career was based on just stealing money from just victims of horrible, horrible accidents. Tracy, you do the same type of work I do. It’s burn victims, people who have been orphaned paraplegics to me, it’s stealing money from anyone is horrible. But when you’re a lawyer and you fiy duty and it’s kind of the most vulnerable people and your career is doing that, as you’re spending $40,000 a month on Erica’s glam squad and you’ve got two planes, as Erica said, one big one and one small one, it’s so offensive.

Maggie Mendenhall Casey:

And Jay, that’s really my first time hearing that Tom Girardi was bribing the bar in California and bar investigators, and that helps to provide a little bit more context as to how he was able to get away with this for decades. But I think this is a good place for us to take our first break.

And we’re back, Jay, before the break, you mentioned that you got both a phone call and a voicemail from Tom Ardi offering you basically a million dollars to not proceed against him for the Lion Air case and failing to pay the clients as well as you put on my pop culture hat in the public sphere, Tom Ardi as well as Erica represented that Tom was in mental decline. He went into assisted living facility. We saw him out and about walking, looking diminished in your conversation and also the voicemail that you received from Tom, did he appear to be diminished to you?

Jay Edelson:

No, definitely was older. There was no question about that. But even his argument, you’ll be joined at the hip with me. I’m in bed with the California judges. I mean, he didn’t know me very well, but that is an argument a criminal would make. And then when I asked him specifically about how much money did he take from the widows and orphans, he nailed it on the dot. Now he’d actually stolen from one other person, which we weren’t aware of, which makes it clear kind of how locked in he was. I find it interesting, the Harvey Weinsteins of the world, the second they get arrested, they have these huge health problems. He was found to be by the court in California to be faking this. And to me, it’s all just a horrible act. And watching him in court doing this is just so absurd with his oversized suits and everything. But my favorite thing was at one point the prosecutor had said something he didn’t like, and when the prosecutor was walking back, he said to the prosecutor, F you, which again, he’s supposed to be diminished, but he’s supposed to not be able to pay any attention to what’s happening. And that got into the record, and I think that influenced the judge on the capacity.

Maggie Mendenhall Casey:

The court reporter was able to hear that and type into the record.

Jay Edelson:

No, the prosecutor said, this is what just happened. And the defense attorney had heard it too apparently and didn’t say it didn’t happen. That was not a good move by Tom, but he’s never been the smartest.

Tracy Brammeier:

Jay I know at the hearing on your motion in front of Judge Durkin, Tom’s lawyer also raised the issue of his competence at that time. What was Judge Durkin’s reaction to that?

Jay Edelson:

I don’t remember the exact reaction to that. I remember I said, this is made up. He’s not incompetent. I think the judge’s view was, and I don’t mean to speak for Judge Dur and he doesn’t need anyone speaking for him, but I think his view was that can be sorted out. He immediately held time in contempt and then referred it to the US attorney in Northern District of Illinois. So my guess is his view was you’re going to make whatever arguments you make at a later point. He was mostly focused on how do we get the money to the widows and orphans? Is it really gone and how do we get some sort of justice? That was my takeaway at least.

Tracy Brammeier:

And almost simultaneously with your motion in front of Judge Durkin, you also filed separately a complaints, a lawsuit against Tom and his firm for breach of his contract with you and with the clients. Did the timing of all of that make the judge ask any questions about your own involvement in the entire situation?

Jay Edelson:

Yeah, I don’t think it was the fact that we had filed the separate suit, the separate suit. Although we were asking for attorney’s fees, we made it clear that we weren’t going to take anything until the widows orphans were made hold. We knew when we filed that the spotlight was going to be on us. That’s always a good thing for criminal defendants to do to say, yes, someone else should have done that. I should have figured it out. At one point, they were literally making the argument that we should have uncovered their lies earlier, which is fairly odd to me. But yeah, judge Durham, one of his first questions was, Jay, how long did you know about this and how come you didn’t come forward more quickly? We were obviously prepared for that question. I told him, looking back, I wish I had and tried to explain what I said here, which is it was just so unimaginable that someone like Tom was stealing what is a relatively small amount of money for him. Obviously millions of dollars is a huge amount, but for him it didn’t make any sense. And accusing another attorney of any criminal conduct, you’ve got to be really careful accusing an icon of the plaintiff’s bar and even reporters when we filed, were calling me up saying, what are you doing? You’re going to ruin your career. A lot of people told us this. This is career ending for you, whether you’re right or wrong. Wow. That didn’t make us not do it, but it made us want to feel like we were a thousand percent. Right.

Maggie Mendenhall Casey:

In addition to naming Tom in your breach of contract complaint, you also named Erica Jane, his wife at the time, or they were maybe perhaps divorced, and you alleged that this was a sham divorce. Do you want to tell us a little bit more about what made you wrap Erica into the lawsuit, why you believe that the divorce was a sham?

Jay Edelson:

Yeah, really, one of the big aha moments was I think it was like election day. She said that she was separating from Tom, and that’s when I said, maybe the money is gone, right or not. I viewed it as a fairly transactional relationship.

Maggie Mendenhall Casey:

Erica wasn’t going to stay around with no money left.

Jay Edelson:

Absolutely her thoughts.

Yeah, when that happened, I went, oh geez, this could be really, really bad. We named her in a few complaints. One of our arguments is that she was the face woman for this criminal operation. We know that he paraded around at some meeting with other lawyers, for example. We know that with the clients in Indonesia, one of the big selling points from his perspective was, look, I’m a famous guy. My wife is famous, we’re super rich. She was very much part of a lot of the presentations. And on the reality show too, a lot of it was promoting the fact that they’re just incredibly successful, which clients don’t mind seeing. So a lot of the cases have really been stayed. So we’ll get back to Erica at the appropriate time, and she’s not the main target for us. The main target is the people who were actively stealing the money. She seemed to be using the stolen money, but I don’t believe that she was involved in stealing it. Of course.

Tracy Brammeier:

So with the people that actually stole the money, Tom’s firm, they went bankrupt almost immediately after you brought all of this out into the open. Whatever happened to the widows and orphans getting compensated,

Jay Edelson:

We actually ended up paying them. What we did was it’s very tough, and Tracy that’s working with victims like this, and especially when they’re from a different country, they did not believe in the American judicial system. So we were urging them to file suit and chase Tom down and chase whoever down to try to get their money back. And that wasn’t terribly exciting to them. Their view was just, this isn’t working for us. So what we did was we actually took an assignment of their claims. We said, look, I’m not going to be able to sleep at night if you guys don’t have money. That’s just not acceptable to me. So our firm will give money to you and then we’ll take an assignment of claims, and it’s a complicated thing where they can get some extra upside, but they’ve gotten the amount of money that they would’ve gotten from the settlements initially. I think there’s more money owed to them, and if we get that back, they’ll get upside in that. If we don’t get any money because everyone’s filing for bankruptcy, then that’s fine. Then we’ll just end up eating that. But we’ll be able to sleep at night.

Tracy Brammeier:

Yeah. Kudos to you for really wearing the white hat in this situation.

Jay Edelson:

Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t think about it in terms of the white hat. I think it’s just how people want to go through in the world. I’m getting older and certainly I’m thinking about my career looking backwards more and what I want my legacy to be, and I have no interest in me being involved in any way in something where was an orphans lose their money. So I didn’t view it in terms of a white hat thing. I just viewed it in terms of really I wanted to be able to sleep at night.

Tracy Brammeier:

So it’s interesting that you say that because it seems like that’s how everybody would want to go through life and how everybody would want to be remembered. But of course, Tom went from having potentially exactly that kind of legacy that you’re describing to completely the opposite. I think after the break we should talk about whether or not Tom Girardi is kind of a symptom of a bigger problem plaguing the plaintiff’s bar. I’d like to hear your thoughts about that. We are back. So Jay, we were just talking before the break about the legacy that Tom Ardi is going to leave behind. He goes from being, as we’ve been discussing, a legend of the plaintiff’s bar a titan in the California legal industry to somebody who just had a total downfall total fall from Grace. Do you think that he is a one-off or is this something that you see as one example of a bigger problem?

Jay Edelson:

Yeah, I think it is unfortunate example of a bigger problem. So I a hundred percent believe in plaintiff’s work. I think that we can effectuate huge change. We can change people’s lives. I love fighting against big corporations who are doing bad things.

Tracy Brammeier:

Me too.

Jay Edelson:

Yes, that’s, but not everybody shares our views. Other people in theBar, they’re happy to make short-term decisions to make an extra dollar. It’s not that they’re all stealing from clients, although they have been some other examples. Michael ATI was doing the same exact thing as Tom, and what you see is the plaintiff’s bar doesn’t actually speak out against this. They all turn their head and pretend it was a one-off thing because for whatever reason, although we always say corporate America needs a reform, we don’t actually do that with ourselves. So if you look at the bigger issues, you see a lot of firms are charging people improper costs. That was something that Tom was doing too. I think if I remember correctly, he was buying rings for Erica and would charge that to a client. And we’ve seen a lot of examples where lawyers are just putting improper charges happens in class actions as well as mass actions.

You see that there’s just a lot of manipulation in terms of how much money the clients get, and if you actually do the math, they should be getting a lot more. And then a lot of other unethical behavior, which is part of the Tom saga, but it doesn’t get focused on because the ceiling from widows and orphans is obviously the main thing. But he was doing things like utilizing case runners, so non-attorneys who were then signing up clients and he was giving them referral fees, which you just absolutely can’t do. And there are so many lawyers in our industry who are doing things like that. There are lawyers who are buying turnkey retainers. So you go to a marketing company and they say, we are going to deliver 20 clients who’ve signed a retainer to you in exchange for money. It’s like, wait a second, who did they sign the retainer with? And then the whole concept is you’re not actually going to work on those cases. You’re going to refer them out to the marketer’s friends and get a piece. And my view is you can’t do any of that stuff, and that is rampant in the plaintiff’s bar. To be clear, I’m not saying that the majority of plaintiff’s attorneys are like that. They’re not. I mean, Tracy, your firm obviously is on the opposite end,

Tracy Brammeier:

But we encounter those people too all the time.

Jay Edelson:

And Bob had spoken out against that too, which is one reasons why he’s still in the hero category for me. He’s always put ethics first, and there are a lot of really good plaintiff’s attorneys out there. The problem is that if you have a bunch that are crossing the line or getting way too close to the line, they make our profession’s reputation really look bad.

Maggie Mendenhall Casey:

And Jay, what would your proposals be, or what have your thoughts been about how to curtail some of this errant behavior? So I have been a public servant my entire career. Currently, I lead the city of Chicago’s tort defense unit, and I don’t have what I understand the pressures to be of having to worry about balancing books because you’re front end, the cases if you don’t win, you’re not getting a cut of it and you’re having to invest your own money or your firm’s money. So what are some ways to try to put up some red flags in the future for cases like this and try to put out some education to help attorneys not fall into these type of traps?

Jay Edelson:

I appreciate the question. There’s a few things. So we are very supportive of a bill that’s been introduced in Springfield. I think we call it the Tom Girardi Bill. One of the issues we saw was when he would steal money from clients, they would then have to go get an attorney, sue him, and then there would be years of litigation, which to me is not fair. We got a very quick result just because we were clever enough to file a contempt motion, but otherwise we would’ve just been the pile of lawsuits that Tom had. So under the Tom Girardi bill, if you think that your attorney has stolen money, you get to go back to the original judge where the case was litigated. If they did steal money in any way, and it’s all an expedited process, if they did steal any money or charge you something improper willfully, if there’s a mistake, that’s fine, but willfully charge you something improper. They lose all of their attorney’s fees. That’s kind of one of the weird things that everyone’s just accepted. Even though Tom stole the money, he was still entitled to his whatever, 33 40% of the fees. Nobody seems to understand that he didn’t actually earn that.

Tracy Brammeier:

Yeah, that should be automatic forfeiture,

Maggie Mendenhall Casey:

Right? I didn’t realize that would even be a fight. Just pay back the part you stole and you get to keep the rest of the fees.

Jay Edelson:

Fees. A lot of times the people investigating these things aren’t as focused on plaintiff law and maybe aren’t thinking through the issues the way that the three of us might, so I’m not putting it on them. There’s so many complicated issues here, and for them, they probably didn’t feel like they had to focus on that because the big stuff was the ceiling, the settlement money, everything else with less of focus. So the Tom Bill would allow people to go and right away would allow them to get, there would be a discouragement of fees, and then they would get attorney’s fees too. You got to make sure that a victim of an attorney stealing money is made whole, and if they’ve got to pay another attorney, they’re not made whole and we’re not going to buy into this concept that the attorney earned the money when they stole it.

We also are very supportive of some new rules about marketing to make it really clear what happens if you are in case, in case running, one of the things that a lot of firms do is they simply a slide of clients. They say, there’s a fund that’s been established, sign up with us, and you’re entitled to that, and there’s no fund at all. It’s the wild west for marketing right now, but we got to stop that. It can be a combination of litigation funding and very crescent marketers. And then you now have a system which we’re supportive of in general, but like in Arizona where non-lawyers can own parts of firms. So you see marketing companies now own parts of firms and they’re really pushing envelope or I think crossing the lines in signing up clients through unethical marketing.

Tracy Brammeier:

And on top of it too, the typical client is an unsophisticated consumer, or even worse, a client who has gone through a horrible experience in their life and is completely vulnerable to aggressive marketing tactics that are unethical or gray at best. There has to be some way to figure out some additional protections in this day and age against that.

Jay Edelson:

Yeah, a hundred percent. It’s the worst time in your life. Some horrible act enter tragedy occurred and now you’ve got to find a lawyer. It’s an emotional thing. Even people who are very sophisticated aren’t necessarily thinking with totally clear heads, and most people are going to believe an advertisement from a lawyer. You would think if they’re running all those ads, someone must have checked on it and the bars are supposed to be doing that, and they’re out to lunch. What they’re doing. The California bars spend a lot of time going after solo practitioners, some things for legitimate reasons, others for foot faults, and then if you would influence, you could skate by for decades

Tracy Brammeier:

Like Tom Girardi did,

Jay Edelson:

Tom Girardi and others at his firm.

Tracy Brammeier:

Yeah. So I think to wrap us up here, I’d like to know Tom Girardi has not been sentenced yet, but what do you think is the right punishment for him considering the depth and breadth of his crimes as well as the need for deterrence against this type of behavior?

Jay Edelson:

I’m very concerned that he’s not going to get an appropriate sentence. They got a conviction on a subset of his fraud. It looks like they’re not going to pursue more trials, which I kind of understands a resource thing. They probably think that they’re going to get a big enough sentence that he’ll spend his life in prison. But this is, in the legal world, a Bernie Madoff’s situation. You can’t have a leader of theBar stealing hundreds of millions of dollars. So I’m not a criminal lawyer, but I think this is a throw the book at him type of situation. But also, I really, really hope that there is a more expansive investigation into all the people he worked with at his firm and others who knew about this and participated in that.

Tracy Brammeier:

Jay, thanks a lot for being here with us today.

Jay Edelson:

Thank you guys for having me.

Maggie Mendenhall Casey:

Thank you so much, Jay Ellison for joining us as a guest today. I also want to thank our executive producer, Jen Byrne, Adam Lockwood on Sound, and everyone at the Legal Talk Network Family. Remember, you can follow us and send us comments, questions, episode ideas, or just troll us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at cba, at theBar, all one word. You can also email us at podcast@chicagobar.org. Please also rate and leave us your feedback on Apple Podcast, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, audible, or wherever you download your podcast at. It helps us to get the word out. Until next time, for everyone here at the CBA, thank you for joining us and we’ll see you soon at theBar.

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