A disbarred Buckhead lawyer was indicted Tuesday on 32 counts of theft and forgery and accused of misusing hundreds of thousands of dollars in client funds, Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard Jr. announced.

Robert Thompson Jr., 65, graduated from Emory University School of Law and started practicing in 1975. For 34 years, he was a business and labor lawyer—as was his father before him—defending corporations and financial institutions and even serving on several banks' boards of directors. That all changed with the Great Recession, when much of his practice disappeared.

In 2009 he reinvented his firm to fight banks foreclosing on mortgage holders. He said at the time he got the idea when his own mortgage servicer wrongfully foreclosed on his home loan after a dispute over payments he said were misapplied. He began specializing in fighting foreclosure. A client called him “the Robin Hood lawyer.” His troubles started after that.