Thomas V. Girardi was disbarred by the California Supreme Court on June 1, two days before he turned 83. He was ordered to pay $2,282,507 plus 10 percent interest to four children of the victims of a fatal air crash, although his ability to make restitution of any of the settlement funds he stole is doubtful.
Girardi is a conservatee and is in bankruptcy.
He is being divorced by his trophy wife, actress/singer Erika Jayne, and has moved from his Pasadena mansion—which was seized by a bank—into an assisted living facility.
His reputation is irredeemable based on litigation in which it is claimed that he and his firm stole millions of dollars in clients’ settlement funds.
The State Bar announced on Jan. 24 that it will intensify its efforts to determine whether disciplinary action against Girardi was averted, through the years, by virtue of Girardi’s influence and the connections he had within the organization. The downtown Los Angeles law firm of Halpern May Ybarra Gelberg LLP was hired to conduct a probe.
A state auditor’s report, issued April 14, declares that the State Bar is doing a shoddy job of dealing with attorneys who time and again breach ethical standards, with repeated complaints against the violators resulting in no action. Girardi was not named in the report, but the Los Angeles Times, in a news story on the report, said:
“The audit of the State Bar was ordered last year by the Legislature in the wake of a Los Angeles Times investigation that documented how the now-disgraced attorney Tom Girardi cultivated close relationships with the agency and kept an unblemished law license despite over 100 lawsuits against him or his firm — with many alleging misappropriation of client money.”
It noted:
“That Girardi's serial misconduct went unchecked for decades has forced a reckoning among the legal establishment.”
An initial peek by the State Bar into its inaction in the face of complaints against Girardi led the regulatory agency to admit in July 2021, that an internal review “revealed mistakes made in some investigations over the many decades of Mr. Girardi’s career going back some 40 years and spanning the tenure of many Chief Trial Counsels.” The bland admission of “mistakes” was widely seen as inadequate absent elaboration.
A statement by State Bar Board of Trustees Chair Ruben Duran, who heads Best & Krieger LLP’s Ontario office, suggests that the State Bar is now set to dig more deeply than before. He said:
“Mark our words: we will go wherever the evidence leads us.”
Duran also commented:
“The State Bar Board leadership and staff take very seriously the immense harm done by Thomas Girardi to innocent victims. We have been proactively doing everything in our power to learn from the past and do better in the future to prevent harms like this from recurring.
“This necessarily includes assessing whether intentional wrongdoing by anyone associated with the State Bar may have influenced how complaints against Girardi were handled.”
While Duran expressed a resolve to determine what occurred when complaints about Girardi were received, he did not provide hope that much of what is learned will be shared with the public. To the contrary, he said:
“Details of the investigation, including details of past closed complaints and investigations, must remain confidential to comply with the law and to give this investigation the greatest chance of success.”
The probe will doubtlessly include questioning of Tom Layton who, while an investigator for the State Bar, acted as an aide to Girardi, frequently accompanying the high-profile lawyer at social events; attorney Walter Lack and former State Bar President Howard Miller, who worked with Girardi on a case that resulted in an ethics probe by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (with a determination that Girardi and Lack had committed misconduct); and former State Bar Court prosecutor Dale G. Nowicki who had a clandestine professional relationship for more than a year with Girardi’s son-in-law, attorney David Lira.
