Every December, when I do an end-of-year legal ethics seminar for the D.C. Bar, I discuss the Unethical Lawyer of the Year. It’s only June, but it’s hard to see how anyone, not even Alvin Bragg, can match Jason Kurland this year

Kurland, an attorney who represented lottery winners and was once a partner at the prestigious firm Rivkin Radler, one of the 200 largest firms in the nation, was sentenced last week to 13 years in prison. He had been found guilty of wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy, honest services wire fraud, unlawful monetary transactions and a related conspiracy charge.

Fraudulent representations by Kurland and his co-defendants caused his clients to lose more than $80 million. He also lifted $19.5 million from the account of one lottery winner to make an investment for the benefit of himself and his accessories.

U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis found that Kurland was responsible for massive financial losses to his clients. “This abuse of power would be problematic in any profession, but it is grotesque and unfathomable for a lawyer,” Garaufis said.

Oh, it’s fathomable. The explanation is greed.

Kurland signed three lottery-winners as clients beginning in mid-2018, the winners of a $1.5 billion Mega Millions lottery, a $245 million Powerball jackpot, and another $150 million jackpot. He persuaded the clients to invest in merchant cash-advance businesses Kurland partly owned (but did not disclose that he owned), and he received secret kickbacks on a percentage of the winners’ investments. Kurland persuaded one lottery-winner to pay $2 million for a business he co-owned. (The ethics rules say lawyers can’t do that, even if it’s a good deal for the client.)

A Justice Department press release explains that Kurland and the two co-defendants “haphazardly invested the lottery victims’ money in high-risk deals, which turned out to be a Ponzi scheme. … Within a little more than a year, a large portion of the Lottery Victims’ investment capital, totaling more than $40 million, was lost.” There’s much more to this story: the best part was when Kurland, desperate to cover for his own Ponzi scheme, got caught in a Ponzi scheme himself. Law and Crime has the juicy details here.

In addition to serving his prison sentence, Kurland has to forfeit $64.6 million. Needless to say, his days as a lawyer are over.

ADDENDUM: Musing on the post while walking Spuds just now, I realized that I left out an important perspective here. Lottery-winners need help. Statistics show that the vast majority of them have blown all of their winnings with five years or less, even the biggest winners. Why? The answer is, to be blunt, that almost all of them are relatively uneducated, financially unskilled, and sadly, not too bright. We know this because they had to play the lottery to win it, and while buying a ticket isn’t quite signature significance, it constitutes strong evidence that the purchaser isn’t going to win “Jeopardy!” any time soon. Playing the lottery regularly indicates a basic lack of understanding in many crucial subjects, including long-term time perspective, statistics, and life priorities.

Lottery-winners, therefore, are easy marks. A lawyer who purports to be helping one and then behaves like Kurland is like a lifeguard who hands a drowning child an anchor. I bet his rationalization is, “These idiots were going to lose their money anyway; at least they could lose it to me.”

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Pointer and Source: ABA Journal