With Alleged Saul Ewing Caper, Swindle Your Law Firm Month Continues

[WSJ_law_blog]

What’s going on here? It’s only the 9th, and already we’re close to deeming September “Rip off your law firm month.”

On Tuesday, we brought you news of a scheme to defraud Wilson Sonsini out of $1 million by billing the firm for office supplies it never received.

Today’s alleged scheme strikes us as even less, uh, sophisticated: just use the firm’s credit card to help finance a side business. Not just any old side business, mind you: but one specializing in entertaining women with male exotic dancers. Click here for the story, from the Washington Post.

The story: A 41 year-old legal secretary at Saul Ewing was charged last week in a Washington, D.C. federal court with fraud.

She also, according to the Post, ran something called Show N Tell Entertainment, out of her home, providing “male performers exclusively for female audiences.” In court filings, an investigator wrote that the secretary organized a trip in August 2007 to the Copamarina Beach Resort in Puerto Rico so that several dozen women could be entertained by male performers. The trip was largely paid for on a credit card that had been issued to an attorney at “a firm that later merged with Saul Ewing.”

In total, prosecutors said, Richie used the card to make $46,848 in fraudulent purchases tied to the trip.

The secretary’s attorney, federal public defender Shawn Franklin Moore, declined to comment to the Post.