A state disciplinary judge has ended the career of a Colorado immigration lawyer and ordered her to pay $8,120 to former clients after determining she spent their money on everything from piano tuning to yoga classes, and then falsified documents to cover up her misdeeds.
The judge concluded the defendant attorney was "unregulatable … and she poses a significant danger to Colorado citizens. She must be disbarred."
The attorney has practiced since 2009 and is licensed in New York but worked in Colorado and practiced in Colorado federal courts. She operated an immigration law practice when she violated state ethics rules.
The disbarment order found that in 2017, an undocumented immigrant paid the attorney $2,620 to request a waiver that would let him leave the country, visit his dying mother, and reenter the U.S. while his visa application was pending. The attorney pocketed the $2,620 and did not pay the visa fee, resulting in his application being denied. He did not see his mother before she died.
In 2019, a woman in an abusive marriage borrowed $2,400 from friends and family and hired the attorney to help her get a work visa to get out of the situation. The attorney kept the money and failed to file or return the paperwork, thus forcing the client to remain in the abusive marriage.
Moreover, beginning in the fall of 2020, the attorney used a trust account for her clients' money "as her personal bank account," according to the court's order. She spent clients' money to pay her rent and car insurance, to cover yoga class fees and city fines, to tune her home piano, and to host a birthday party for her child. Ironically, some of the clients' money was used to pay for a required course on legal ethics.
The theft of client funds was uncovered when, in 2022, Chase Bank contacted the Colorado Office of Attorney Regulation to report that her trust account was overdrawn. The OAR then asked the defendant for three months of bank statements. Later, when the office subpoenaed Chase, it realized that she had falsified the statements she sent. Justin Wingerter, "Judge disbars 'unscrupulous' Arvada lawyer who abandoned clients" www.denverpost.com. (Mar. 26, 2025).
Commentary
ABA Model Rule 1.15 governs an attorney's duty of safekeeping property belonging to clients or third parties. Few violations of ethics rules are more sacrosanct than this, and practitioners who run afoul of this Rule will quickly find themselves facing disciplinary charges.
Rule 1.15 requires that a lawyer shall hold property of clients or third persons that is in a lawyer's possession in connection with a representation separate from the lawyer's own property.
Moreover, funds shall be kept in a separate account maintained in the state where the lawyer's office is situated or elsewhere with the consent of the client or third person. This was not done by the Colorado attorney.
Moreover, complete records of such account funds and other property shall be kept by the lawyer and shall be preserved for five years after the termination of the representation.
