I just saw that another lawyer was discovered never having gone to law school. Seems Kimberly Kitchens of the Pennsylvania bar kind of forgot to go to law school, but managed nevertheless to parlay her decade spent as a paralegal into a job with a Huntingdon firm, where she made partner after 10 years of good work on estate and probate matters. In the firm's defense, she had forged a law school transcript, bar exam results, a law license and even a check paying her bar dues. With all of this evidence, the other partners never bothered to check with bar officials as to whether she was really a lawyer.

This reminds me of the Brian Valery case I handled some years ago as chief disciplinary counsel. Valery was a New York paralegal at a big firm who convinced the firm to pay for him to attend law school. Fordham, as I remember. He never went. I think he kept the money they gave him for tuition. As I remember it, he also forged transcripts and bar results. Apparently, to add verisimilitude to his charade, he even pretended to have failed the bar on his first try.

He was discovered when a college friend tried to track him down first by calling bar officials, as he remembered Brian was going to go to law school. Later, when the friend could not find Valery that way, he found a person who he thought was him at the firm. When he called to ask about his pal, he told the person there who answered the phone that he thought Valery was a lawyer but that bar officials had no record of him. One thing led to another.