Economist Says in Negligence Suit His Divorce Lawyer Didn't Act to Protect His Nobel Prize Money
Joseph Stiglitz, an economist and Nobel Memorial Prize winner, is suing his former lawyer for $1 million for professional negligence, on the basis that had she been quicker filing his divorce papers, his now ex-wife wouldn’t have received part of the prize’s $300,000 award, or share future earnings based on it.
Jury selection for the Washington, D.C., federal case was set to begin today, Bloomberg reports. Stiglitz received the prize in 2001 for work showing that markets are inefficient when all parties in a transaction don’t have equal access to critical information.
He claims that when he hired Rita M. Bank in 2000, she did not inform him that she has previously consulted with his second wife, Jane Hannaway. And according to the complaint, Bank advised Stiglitz to settle with Hannaway rather than file divorce papers in Washington, D.C.
Stiglitz anticipated “that certain future publications he was working on, along with the potential award of the Nobel Prize in Economics in October 2001, would generate income which he wished to protect from being awarded in a divorce to Hannaway,” the complaint states.
In 2002, Bank told Stiglitz she could no longer represent him because she was joining a law firm with Sanford Ain, Hannaway’s lawyer, Bloomberg reports. According to the complaint, Hannaway found out “weeks, perhaps months” earlier, and filed for divorce in New York, where state law allowed her to make a claim against Stiglitz’s future income.
Bank, now a partner with Ain & Bank in Washington, D.C., has denied the allegations, according to Bloomberg.
