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A Montgomery County personal injury lawyer has been sentenced to five years in prison and ordered to pay $3.4 million in restitution after pleading guilty to a scheme to steal multiple cases over the course of a decade from a Philadelphia law firm where he worked.

Neil Mittin, 64, formerly of Gay & Chacker, was sentenced Thursday by U.S. District Judge Michael Baylson of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania for one count of mail fraud. Mittin's lawyer, Joseph Poluka of Blank Rome, declined to comment on the sentence.

Mittin worked at the firm for 38 years, and ran the scheme from 2008 to 2018, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

Prosecutors alleged that Mittin referred the cases without the firm's clients' knowledge. He hid his activity from the firm by closing the files for those matters and altering the firm's records to show that there was no settlement or resolution and that the cases were not viable.

"Following the fraudulent referrals, the outside attorneys to whom Mittin referred these matters attempted to resolve them with a settlement or a trial. If the matter was resolved successfully, the attorneys paid Mittin a referral fee, on average, of between 33 and 40% of the contingency fees obtained by the attorneys," prosecutors said in a statement issued Thursday. "The attorneys also paid Mittin a reimbursement amount for the costs that the law firm incurred before Mittin referred the cases out. The defendant illegally pocketed these referral payments and reimbursement costs and did not disclose to the law firm that the matters were resolved in this fashion."

The personal injury cases and other matters that Mittin referred to other lawyers generated approximately $10.8 million in recoveries for the firm's former clients, prosecutors said in their statement, adding that as a result of the scheme, Mittin defrauded the law firm out of nearly $4.2 million in legal fees and costs, including the share of those fees and costs that he obtained from the outside lawyers.

"As officers of the court, attorneys are expected to uphold the law, but Mittin did just the opposite," said U.S. Attorney William McSwain of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. "He siphoned millions of dollars away from his firm for nearly a decade by stealing clients, covering his tracks, and lining his pockets with bogus referral fees and reimbursements for costs he never incurred. Today, he has been held accountable for his actions, and rightly so."