Paid $650K in bonuses, 2 lawyers formed new firm and 'wiped out' senior lawyer, suit says
When a Georgia boutique settled a False Claims Act case after 16 years of litigation last year, Bothwell Bracker’s sole shareholder had a plan.
Mike Bothwell gave big bonuses to his non-equity partner, Julie Bracker, and associate Jason Marcus, who got $400,000 and $250,000 respectively. Paralegal Sheri Lang got $45,000, recounts the Daily Report (sub. req.).
Bothwell expected the three lawyers to form a new firm in which all would be equity partners. But on Jan. 5 he arrived at work after a holiday weekend and made a stunning discovery: The two junior lawyers had resigned and had largely vacated the law office.
For months, alleges a state-court lawsuit filed last month in Fulton County, the two junior lawyers had been planning to form their own firm and, with the knowledge of Lang, they had “wiped out nearly the entire practice” by uploading thousands of pages of Bothwell Bracker records to cloud servers and deleting firm files. According to the suit, Marcus had also loaded 10,000 e-books onto the firm’s computer in December, then deleted them. This would overwrite the deleted Bothwell Bracker files and make it virtually impossible for a forensic expert to recover them.
The suit also says Bracker and Marcus contacted clients and urged them to follow the two to their new practice while they were still on Bothwell Bracker’s payroll, and that they had been searching for premises for their new firm as early as October.
It names Lang as well as the two attorneys and their new firm as defendants. The suit asserts causes of action for alleged conversion, defamation, breach of fiduciary duty and violation of state and federal computer statutes, among other claims.
Kristofer Schleicher of Giacoma Schleicher Roberts & Daughdrill is one of the lawyers representing Bothwell and his firm.
“This would have been a completely different thing if they’d said, ‘Mike, we want to do something different,’ ” Schleicher told the Daily Report. However, “to just contact everybody while you’re still being paid, and drop a note on a desk saying you quit? The hubris of it is amazing.”
But a lawyer representing the defendants has a different perspective. Michael Caplan of Caplan Cobb said the suit is meritless and Bothwell’s allegations are “bogus,” the legal publication reports.
Clients were properly given a choice between staying with Bothwell or moving to the new firm, Caplan said. Plus, it was Bothwell, rather than the other lawyers, who created difficulties about files, he contended, by resisting the transfer of matters to the new firm.
“Mr. Bothwell alleges that, upon departing the firm, Julie and Jason wrongfully kept copies of case files of the clients that requested Julie and Jason to continue to represent them,” Caplan said in a written statement provided to the Daily Report. “That is a bizarre allegation because it is well-settled that client case files are the property of the clients. Julie and Jason acted properly and in their clients’ best interests by maintaining copies of certain files on the instruction of their clients.”
He also said the bonuses the junior lawyers and Lang received were in exchange for working for years at reduced salaries in exchange for a share of the settlement that eventually resulted.
