The Tom Girardi scandal appeared poised to assert two extra authorized careers Friday because the State Bar of California initiated disbarment proceedings towards the disgraced trial legal professional’s son-in-law and one other lawyer at his once-vaunted agency.
Company prosecutors are in search of to strip the licenses of former Girardi Keese litigators David Lira, who’s married to Girardi’s daughter, and Keith Griffin, certainly one of final legal professionals to flee the crumbling agency two years in the past.
Disciplinary notices filed in State Bar Court docket accuse each of misappropriating funds and different misconduct associated to the agency’s illustration of the households of airline crash victims killed in a 2018 crash off the coast of Indonesia.
Revelations about cash lacking from the Lion Air settlements led to the collapse of Girardi’s agency in 2020, scrutiny of his troubled historical past with consumer funds, his disbarment final yr and a federal indictment earlier this yr accusing him and Lira of wire fraud fees. Each have pleaded not responsible.
The State Bar case towards Lira and Griffin alleges that they helped him conceal from their shoppers, Indonesian widows and orphans, that thousands and thousands in settlement cash had arrived right into a agency belief account, however that it was not flowing on to the shoppers.
David Lira outdoors Los Angeles County-USC Medical Middle on April 2, 2019. He was one of many attorneys who signify Rafael Reyna, on life assist within the hospital following a weekend assault outdoors Dodger Stadium, saying the crew hasn’t executed sufficient to enhance safety since an analogous assault eight years in the past. (AP Photograph/Christopher Weber)
(Christopher Weber / Related Press)
Lira is accused of issuing checks totalling $2.7 million from an account holding the Boeing cash to pay “people and entities that had been unrelated to the consumer households.” Prosecutors allege that each males had been conscious Girardi was mendacity to shoppers concerning the cash, however didn’t inform them.
Lira’s legal professional didn’t return messages in search of remark. Ryan Saba, an legal professional for Griffin, mentioned, “We’re going to contest the allegations.”
“Keith was not a signatory of the consumer belief account nor did he have any entry to any financial institution accounts. The true villain right here is Tom Girardi,” he mentioned.
Each Lira and Griffin had labored on the agency for 20 years, however have insisted that they’d little perception into its funds as a result of it didn’t function like a standard agency. Girardi was the only real proprietor and although he gave legal professionals the title of accomplice, they had been his workers and had no energy over how he ran the agency.
Lira, 63, left the agency about six months earlier than it shuttered. He has testified that he fought together with his father-in-law concerning the airline cash earlier than his resignation. Griffin, 51, remained till simply earlier than the agency stopped working, and has mentioned he instructed the Indonesians to sue Girardi for authorized malpractice earlier than he left.
Of their submitting, State Bar prosecutors additionally alleged that each legal professionals lied to the federal decide overseeing the airline case. Griffin is accused of giving false testimony at a 2021 listening to in Chicago the place he denied making “lulling” statements to an Indonesian consumer in search of solutions about his settlement cash.
Lira is accused of mendacity in the identical listening to when he testified that the airline case was the one Girardi Keese settlement he knew of the place cash was delayed for a month and a half or extra. Prosecutors declare Lira knew of a number of different situations, together with payouts held again from a burn sufferer and residents of a polluted Riverside neighborhood suing for poisonous contamination.
Lira can also be accused in a separate case of misappropriating $369,000 from a 2014 settlement stemming from a collision between a automotive and a Caltrans dump truck that killed two individuals.
