Legal Secretary to Plead in $272K Theft
A longtime legal secretary who was the sole employee of a sole practitioner in Virginia is expected to plead guilty today in a case alleging that she embezzled $272,000 from an estate client of the law firm.
Shelia Mae Boone was federally indicted in August after complaints from the family of the deceased about the firm’s slow settlement of the $420,000 estate. Harvey Latney Jr., the lawyer she worked for, also serves as as part-time commonwealth’s attorney in Caroline County and was apparently stunned at the news of the embezzlement, an earlier ABAJournal.com post notes. She is expected to plead guilty today, a week ahead of her scheduled trial for allegedly forging Latney’s signature on two checks totaling about $272,000, reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
“Authorities have said they believe Boone kept Latney from seeing letters about the Williams estate and replied to some of them herself, forging Latney’s signature,” the newspaper article recounts. “They think she erased some voice mail telephone messages and accepted court summonses for Latney without telling him.”
Meanwhile, Craig Cooley, a well-known Richmond defense attorney, is asking fellow practitioners to consider donating money to help Latney reimburse the estate. That has raised a bit of a kerfuffle in Latney’s ongoing re-election campaign, after an opponent seized on the letter as indicative of what he contends is the prosecutor’s too-cooperative relationship with the defense bar, reports another Times-Dispatch article.
Cooley says he sent a letter to other lawyers asking for donations because Latney, a courtroom opponent, “is perhaps the most respected attorney and human being that I know,” the newspaper reports.
Such a law office embezzlement by a trusted employee, Cooley says, “could happen to any one of us.”
