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A Fancy Word for Stealing

By Lynne DeVenny

The South Carolina Now headline rather dryly announces, "Hartsville woman accused of misappropriating clients' funds".

Unfortunately, the news story is about a paralegal, Rebecca Shaw, of Hartsville, South Carolina. She has been charged by the State Law Enforcement Division (SLED) with almost a dozen criminal counts arising from the alleged misappropriation of at least $245,000 in client settlement funds from a law firm trust account.

Misappropriation is defined as the intentional, illegal use of the property or funds entrusted to your care, but actually owned by someone else. It's accurate in this instance, but I prefer the shorter, more powerful verb stealing. Theft and larceny also work for me. Let's be direct when talking about taking things that do not belong to us. Breach of trust and betrayal also come to mind when legal professionals take money from the people they are supposed to be protecting, helping and advocating for.

It would be great if this turned out to be the biggest accounting error ever, and not a situation where a law firm employee forged clients' signatures in order to cash a disturbing number of settlement checks over a six-year period.

With the SLED estimating the amount of missing funds "to go well beyond $245,000 before the investigation is complete," you have to wonder how this went on so long, and what could have been done differently to protect both the law firm and its clients from blatant mismanagement of a trust account.

I don't like reading these stories any more than you do. I'm proud to be a paralegal, and I'm proud of the work that many legal professionals do. But I don't like to be reminded that a few rotten apples make the rest of us look bad when they use their training and their access to large amounts of money to steal - not only funds that don't belong to them - but also the public's trust.

Source: South Carolina Now

Full post as published by Practical Paralegalism on August 24, 2010 (boomark / email).