Dmitry Shubov Dmitry Shubov founder of LegalMatch.com.

Dmitry Shubov, who during the 1990s worked at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson before founding LegalMatch.com, was arraigned Tuesday on criminal charges filed by a grand jury in Stanislaus County, California.

Shubov, 44, faces 10 felony counts stemming from what authorities allege was a sexual relationship between the entrepreneur and a 14-year-old girl from Modesto, California. Prosecutors claim that Shubov initially met the girl, a minor identified as “Jane Doe” in court documents, on seekingarrangement.com, a dating website that seeks to pair older, wealthier men and women called “Sugar Daddies or Mommas” with younger partners, or “Sugar Babies.”

A Modesto police spokeswoman told The Modesto Bee this week that the two individuals met on the site more than two years ago when the girl was 14. According to a criminal complaint against Shubov filed in May 2017, their relationship eventually turned sexual by mid-July 2015 and continued through late March of this year. The girl's family learned of the relationship and reported it to police and Shubov was subsequently arrested on April 21.

In an indictment filed two days after that initial criminal complaint, the grand jury's charges against Shubov accuse him of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, oral copulation with a minor and sodomy. Frank Carson, a Modesto lawyer representing Shubov, did not immediately respond to a request for comment about his client. But Carson told The Modesto Bee that the charges against Shubov are “baseless” and that there is no evidence to support them.

Shubov, who is out on a $200,000 bond, is scheduled to return to court for a motion hearing on Nov. 30. Court records show that a civil case was also filed against Shubov on June 28 in Stanislaus County by a Modesto resident named Autumn Bassard. Alonzo Gradford, a Modesto lawyer representing Bassard, did not immediately return a request for comment about the case, whose docket states it involves a “personal injury—auto” matter, one in which Shubov is being advised by high-profile Los Angeles firm Lavely & Singer.

The two cases against Shubov are not the first time he has run into legal trouble. New York state attorney registration records show that he was disbarred from practicing law in 2004. Shubov had previously spent time in the mid-1990s as a summer associate at Skadden, according to his profile on professional networking website LinkedIn, before joining Fried Frank in 1997 following his graduation from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.

In May 1999, Shubov left Fried Frank to found LegalMatch.com, a free online legal matching service that sought to connect lawyers with potential clients. But in 2004, Shubov was charged with and ultimately pleaded guilty to illegally retrieving and deleting voicemails from a rival company called Casepost.com. Shubov was fined $5,000, sentenced to two years' probation and the dispute ultimately led to his disbarment.

Shubov's LinkedIn profile now identifies him as a founder and CEO of Adzoco, a company that seeks to change how people view their private and personal property.