By Greg Land, From Daily Report

Suit claims wiped files, missing clients, empty offices and an ‘I quit’ note

Law firm dissolutions are often messy affairs, but a suit filed in Fulton County last month described the departure of two of the three lawyers who once comprised Roswell boutique Bothwell Bracker, which specializes in False Claims Act litigation, as “a textbook example of how not to leave a law firm.”

According to the complaint filed June 25 in Fulton County State Court, Mike Bothwell, the firm’s owner and sole shareholder, had big plans for 2015. Last summer, the firm settled a major federal FCA suit that Bothwell had been handling for 16 years.

Late last year, Bothwell handed out bonuses totaling nearly $700,000 to his nonequity partner, Julie Bracker, and to the firm’s associate and paralegal. According to the suit, the money—about $400,000 to Bracker, $250,000 to associate Jason Marcus and $45,000 to paralegal Sheri Lang—was an inducement for the three to join in a new firm in which all three lawyers were to have an ownership interest.

On Monday, Jan. 5, Bothwell returned to his office after the New Year’s holiday to find Bracker’s office “stripped bare” and Marcus’ office in “disarray.”

On his desk were resignation letters from Bracker and Marcus. Bracker’s letter said she was taking several of the firm’s clients with her and, among other things, had removed her page from the firm’s website.

Marcus’ four-sentence letter was more succinct.

“Mike: I quit, effective immediately,” it began.

According to the suit, Bracker and Marcus—with Lang’s knowledge—”wiped out nearly the entire practice” of Bothwell’s 19-year-old firm, uploading thousands of pages of its files to cloud-based servers, deleting case records and bad-mouthing Bothwell to clients.

His former colleagues used their bonus money to underwrite their new firm, Bracker & Marcus, it said.

Among the allegations are claims that Bracker and Marcus failed to produce files and emails for clients who elected to stay with Bothwell, and that they deleted firm files prior to leaving.

Between Dec. 1 and Jan. 4, the complaint said, “Marcus downloaded approximately 10,000 e-bookson his firm computer and then deleted them” in order to overwrite data so that it would be “essentially impossible to recover” by a forensic examination.

Bothwell and his firm are represented by Darren Summerville and Angela Fox of the Summerville Firm, and Kristofer Schleicher and Parsa Fattahi of Giacoma Schleicher Roberts & Daughdrill.

Schleicher said Bothwell had been shocked when he arrived to find his office empty.

“You put almost 20 years of work into the firm,” he said. “Then you come in the office one day and everything is gone, taken by the people you were about to make full partner.”

According to the suit, Bracker and Marcus began looking for office space as early as October, and about that time began “slow rolling cases,” billing reduced hours and stalling new cases until they could get their own firm up and running.

It also said the pair had begun contacting clients and urging them to transfer their cases to the new firm while they were still on Bothwell Bracker’s payroll.

Firm breakups are fairly commonplace, said Schleicher, “but there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it.”

“This would have been a completely different thing if they’d said, ‘Mike, we want to do something different,’ but … 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.”

The 13-count complaint names Bracker, Marcus, Lane and the Bracker & Marcus firm, and includes allegations of racketeering, fraudulent misrepresentation and concealment, breach of fiduciary duty, conversion, defamation, slander and violations of the Georgia Computer Systems Protection Act and the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, among others.

Caplan Cobb partner Michael Caplan, who represents the defendants, forwarded a statement taking issue with Bothwell’s version of events.

Bracker and Marcus “chose, for professional and ethical reasons that will be more fully explained in the appropriate forum, to split off from Bothwell Bracker and start their own firm,” the statement said. “Every one of the clients who chose to continue being represented by Julie and Jason was presented with the option of being represented by Mike Bothwell’s firm or Julie and Jason’s new firm, Bracker & Marcus LLC, and they chose to continue with Julie and Jason as their counsel.”

“Unfortunately,” it continued, “Mr. Bothwell responded to their split-off by making a series of bogus allegations and demands against his former colleagues and clients. First, Mr. Bothwell tried to force clients into changing their minds by refusing to turn over certain case files and demanding millions of dollars in purported hourly fees. When that failed, Mr. Bothwell filed a meritless lawsuit against his former colleagues, including a second-year paralegal.”

In regard to the hefty bonuses Bothwell handed out, Caplan said Bracker and Marcus had, for many years, accepted reduced salaries “in exchange for bonuses or profit distributions when large cases settled.”

The case that settled in 2014 resulted in a “multimillion-dollar fee,” Caplan wrote. “A very small fraction of that fee was paid to Mr. Bothwell’s colleagues and staff for their years of work on the case. Those payments were never conditioned on any agreement to continue working in a firm involving Mike Bothwell.”

Caplan said the dispute concerning case files, and the allegations in Bothwell’s suit that Bracker and Marcus had stolen computer files, were groundless.

“The clients that chose to continue being represented by Jason and Julie did so because they were the lawyers those clients knew and trusted,” his statement said.

“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,” said his statement. “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.”

Bothwell’s claims that Bracker and Marcus improperly removed personal files “are among the most absurd in his complaint,” said Caplan. “People do not relinquish their personal data upon departing the workplace. Last I checked, removing one’s own Tom Clancy e-book collection is not a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.”

Caplan referred the Daily Report to one of the federal cases that followed Bracker and Marcus from their old firm. In that case, they and Caplan argued earlier this year that, in response to their clients’ decision to transfer their representation to the new firm, Bothwell contacted those clients and told them he was filing a lien for more than a million dollars in attorney fees.

The Bracker & Marcus filings said that Bothwell vastly overstated his claimed fees, failed to provide any time sheets to support them, and was using the threat of liens on partial settlement payments in an effort to intimidate the plaintiffs into coming back to his firm, now known as Bothwell Law Group.

They also accused Bothwell of failing to deliver case files for his former clients to their new firm.

In response pleadings, Bothwell’s attorneys—Summerville and Schleicher—said he had only filed notices of liens, and had not placed actual liens on the settlement payments, which totaled about $100,000.

The million-dollar-plus billing represented eight years of work on the case, they argued.

They also said he had delivered all the files requested.

“The filings in that case reflect the hubris and professional irresponsibility consistent with the conduct outlined in [Bothwell’s] complaint,” said Schleicher.

IMAGE: Mike Bothwell File photo

For more on this story go to: http://www.dailyreportonline.com/id=1202731735127/How-Not-to-Leave-a-Law-Firm-Suit-Claims-Wiped-Files-Missing-Clients-Empty-Offices-and-an-I-Quit-Note#ixzz3fV2AHn00