MEG: Stand with Meg. Hey, welcome to the Stand With Meg Show. I’m here with Shawn Lee for The Shawn Lee Report. We’re excited to have you today, Shawn. Welcome to this wonderful thing up here. He’s got a plethora of things he wants to show you guys, and I’m really excited, because he’s got some fun stuff. All right, what do you have for us today, Shawn?
SHAWN: Well, Meg, I’m really excited about this. You and I are going to delve into white-collar crime. White-collar crime. Yes, I have a white collar on. And the reason I have a white collar on is that we’re going to talk about wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
MEG: So look, we have our file. We’re looking into wire fraud. So every time he meets with me, he gives me this… or he gave it to me, and then he constantly gives me more and more stuff. So it’s our fraud file. Isn’t it lovely? It’s reused.
SHAWN: Yes, yes. No, this is real. We want to see some people held accountable, and we want to see institutional change.
MEG: Amen.
SHAWN: So I’m going to introduce you to our cast of characters. I am ethically prohibited under Rule 8.2 from commenting on individuals. I may suspect that they are committing crimes. I may have a sincere belief that they are committing crimes. But if I make allegations like that about a sitting judge, a lawyer, or a guardian ad litem, they can get me in trouble under Rule 8.2. So I’m going to introduce you to our cast of characters.
MEG: Well, we don’t want him to lose his bar license, so we’re doing this fun thing. And I think this would be fun, too, whenever people talk about it, to use these actors. You can draw what conclusions you want from these actors. Okay, so you want me to hold it up while you say it?
SHAWN: Sure. That way we can talk about it. Let’s start with the divorce.
MEG: Here, I’ll be her. So who do we have?
SHAWN: We have the divorce of Robert Baratheon and Cersei Baratheon. So this is the woman of the divorce, and that’s the man. So here’s the thing, Meg. My line is that there’s less criminals in criminal law than in family law.
Okay, let me explain that rationale. In criminal law, it is the state, or the government, versus John Doe. One person is alleged to have committed a crime, and on the other side of that are prosecutors and cops. So some of those people who are charged are innocent, which means 50% or less of the people in criminal law are criminals. Well, this is family law. Robert Baratheon is guilty of a whole host of crimes. He human-trafficked his friends while they were married. Lyanna Stark… Lyanna Stark was in love with Rhaegar Targaryen.
MEG: What show is this from?
SHAWN: Game of Thrones.
MEG: Oh, I knew that. Sorry, it’s been a while. Okay, yeah, I knew that. I love Game of Thrones.
SHAWN: The backstory here… I’ve read the books. The backstory: Robert Baratheon was betrothed to Lyanna Stark, but Lyanna Stark loved Rhaegar Targaryen and had his love baby. Rather than accept this, Robert Baratheon engaged in sedition and treason. He overthrew the royal government, and then he murdered Rhaegar Targaryen with a hammer.
MEG: I forgot about that.
SHAWN: Once he was married, Robert Baratheon was a serial cheater, and he even dispatched assassins to take out a young Daenerys Targaryen.
MEG: Terrible guy. Terrible guy.
SHAWN: And this was his wife, Cersei Baratheon. I think a lot of people are familiar with Cersei. It’s very clear that there is nothing Cersei Baratheon will not do. She will kill anyone. She will lie to anyone. She will sleep with anyone. There is nothing in the world that Cersei Baratheon will not do. And these two need a divorce, so they’re filing for divorce.
MEG: How many kids do they have? Don’t they have three kids, or two boys or something? I can’t remember.
SHAWN: Three children, and paternity is something of a question.
MEG: That’s right. I remember that.
SHAWN: There are allegations.
MEG: Oh, I have to rewatch this now.
SHAWN: Yeah. There are allegations that the children are not Robert’s.
MEG: That’s right. Okay, so these two are the people getting divorced. So what happened? Who’s hiring an attorney first?
SHAWN: So both these people need a divorce. Now, let me walk you through something.
MEG: Okay.
SHAWN: Rule 1.5 in the ethical rules of Kansas states that a lawyer’s fee shall be reasonable. Now, these two got a lot of problems.
MEG: A lawyer’s fee shall be reasonable.
SHAWN: Exactly. They got a lot of problems. They need a divorce. How are they going to have a reasonable fee, right? Well, let me show you who they have hired. I’ll do the mom lawyer. Okay. So Cersei Baratheon has hired Billy Flynn, out of Chicago.
MEG: Chicago.
SHAWN: Billy Flynn is a high-profile lawyer. He specializes in women who have been alleged to have murdered their husbands. And what he does is, he goes into court and portrays them as good, honest people who would certainly never murder their husbands in cold blood.
MEG: Okay. No, no, no, no… what’s that song?
SHAWN: No, no, no. That’s mom’s lawyer. Now, dad has hired Saul Goodman, from Breaking Bad.
MEG: Breaking Bad.
SHAWN: So Saul Goodman, he’s a creative lawyer, not afraid to hire people to throw themselves in front of cars for personal injury cases. Robert Baratheon has hired him to make allegations about Cersei. Both of them are making allegations about each other. Robert Baratheon is alleging that Cersei is this terrible person. Cersei has hired Billy Flynn to defend her honor. And so the court has appointed…
MEG: So wait a second. Why do they appoint this? What’s happening? Why do they appoint somebody else?
SHAWN: So they both have pending motions.
MEG: Okay. So they both have their attorneys. They’re with their attorneys.
SHAWN: Yep.
MEG: And then what happens? Why did all of a sudden someone else come on the case?
SHAWN: So Robert Baratheon and Saul Goodman got together, and they’re like, “Well, she’s crazy.” And Saul Goodman says, “Well, you need a psychological evaluation.” And then she says he’s crazy.
MEG: Yeah. Or abusive.
SHAWN: Yep. And so they each are advised by their lawyers. Now look, Cersei and Robert, they just need a divorce. They’re busy, they’re running their lives, and they are pretty bad people. So in comes the third person. It’s these lawyers who are running it. These lawyers get together, they send each other a raven, and they say, “You know who’d be the perfect doctor for this case?” Because they talk on the phone all the time.
MEG: Yeah.
SHAWN: They talk on the phone, they hang out, they got other cases. They say, “You know who would be the perfect doctor for this case? Dr. Hannibal Lecter.”
MEG: I don’t know the song for that.
SHAWN: Dr. Lecter is an esteemed physician. He’s well known amongst the family law bar. Excellent credentials. Absolutely brilliant physician. I mean, come on, he has some personal shortcomings. And they’re buddies. They’re all buddies. These lawyers have worked with Dr. Lecter in the past, and in fact, they have referral fee agreements.
MEG: Now, is that allowed? Referral fees with lawyers, if it’s in the court system?
SHAWN: So lawyers pay referral fees all the time. Doctors pay referral fees all the time. And it could be construed as kickbacks. Okay, thank you. Enter white-collar crime. White-collar crime.
Okay. Dr. Lecter, he looks into these two individuals, Robert Baratheon and Cersei Baratheon, and he decides, “You know what? The children need a tele-guardian ad litem.”
MEG: Oh, so now we have another court actor.
SHAWN: Yep. Well, Saul Goodman and Billy Flynn, they’ve worked with this tele-guardian ad litem before. Name unknown, but they work remotely. This is them, over a forest, feet up, looking at a computer. Now, this tele-guardian ad litem is never actually going to meet the kids or form a relationship with them. This tele-guardian ad litem is just going to read reports from everybody else and then give an opinion to the judge. And again, all of them know each other from other cases and work together all the time. Sometimes they even suppress allegations of misconduct against each other.
MEG: So technically, they already know the fate of your divorce by who you hire, these two guys. This is the person right here who can have the most impact on your divorce: the tele-guardian ad litem, or just a regular guardian ad litem. Because there are a lot of non-tele ones that don’t even meet the kids or talk to the parents.
SHAWN: Yes. So they’re not technically a tele, but they still don’t meet the parents. They e-file, they video, they call.
MEG: Okay, so that is a tele.
SHAWN: They don’t… they text.
MEG: Okay, so that’s a good thing.
SHAWN: They text, they email, Zoom meetings. They e-file, Zoom meetings. And what are texts, digital signatures, emails? Wires. All wires.
MEG: So technically, that’s a tele… that’s a tele-GAL.
SHAWN: Now we’re going to meet a real individual.
MEG: Who is this?
SHAWN: This is Judge Michael Conahan.
MEG: And who’s that?
SHAWN: Judge Michael Conahan was convicted of trafficking children.
MEG: Where was this?
SHAWN: Pennsylvania.
MEG: Pennsylvania.
SHAWN: Pennsylvania. Judge Conahan was a participant in a scheme. He used his gavel, his robe, his courtroom in order to send children to detention centers for money. And he recently had his sentence commuted by President Joe Biden.
MEG: He had his sentence what?
SHAWN: His sentence commuted.
MEG: What does that mean?
SHAWN: He walked out of jail.
MEG: So he’s a free man?
SHAWN: Free man.
MEG: Oh, my word. But he’s not working anymore, right?
SHAWN: But that’s the kind of power…
MEG: Oh, yeah.
SHAWN: …that these people have.
MEG: Absolutely. Power. Affluence. We should get a board and put all these up. So this is our cast of characters. Okay, we have mom and dad, Robert Baratheon and Cersei Baratheon. We have their lawyers, Saul Goodman and Billy Flynn. We should get blow-up dolls! And then we have the tele-guardian ad litem and the esteemed Dr. Hannibal Lecter.
Now, we didn’t add in CPS or other mediators, because there are other mediators on top of this. Sometimes there are more therapists. We had a therapist. Then there are co-parenting classes they want you to take together. That’s another one, too. It just keeps going and going.
SHAWN: There’s no shortage of characters. We can add characters, and we are open to suggestions.
MEG: Yeah, open to suggestions. Villains from movies. So who should we add next?
SHAWN: Well, let’s start with what we know about these characters. Okay, so, wire fraud. There’s the act of wire fraud, and that involves using wires in order to engage in a scheme or artifice to defraud.
MEG: What does “artifice” mean?
SHAWN: It’s just fake.
MEG: Fake.
SHAWN: It’s all artificial. Artifice.
MEG: Sorry, I’m trying to do everything more so people understand.
SHAWN: Yeah. But then there’s conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
MEG: Meaning on purpose, when they all circle up together?
SHAWN: Two or more people, and they take an act in furtherance. And the act does not have to be an illegal act.
MEG: So just talking?
SHAWN: So, conspiracy law. I’ve practiced a lot of criminal defense and conspiracy law, and you can be held accountable for being a part of a conspiracy if you know there’s an agreement to violate the laws and you take an act in furtherance. And that doesn’t mean you have to know everybody involved. So the tele-guardian ad litem may not know Judge Michael Conahan, may not know Dr. Hannibal Lecter. But if they know that there is an agreement to violate the laws, and they take an act in furtherance, meaning they retaliate against somebody…
MEG: So you’re saying, so people understand this…
SHAWN: Two or more. So there are three people here. Two or more.
MEG: So if they all decide, “Let’s even put the kids in CPS,” and these three conspire, talk, communicate, and work together to do it, that is conspiracy. Conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
SHAWN: Yes.
MEG: Wire fraud, because a lot of times it’s email, too.
SHAWN: Emails are wires.
MEG: I know. So we’re going to get into how to put together a file, and so we’re starting to practice. We have a file. We’ve printed out the rules. Now, let’s talk about the bills.
SHAWN: All right. There’s so much in family court, Meg, that is subjective. An opinion. Someone can form an opinion, and that’s their professional opinion, and it’s hard to go after an opinion, right? Money is a hard piece of data. If you can look at your lawyer’s invoice, or your co-parent’s lawyer’s invoice, or a guardian ad litem’s invoice, or a doctor’s invoice, and you can trace that money back to any of these other characters, you will have traced, potentially, evidence in support of a crime.
MEG: So, for instance, let’s say she’s looking through her therapist’s… sorry, the GAL’s bill. And she notices this GAL… Pull that out for me. Where’s the GAL? She notices that the GAL has been communicating only with her ex’s attorney.
SHAWN: Yeah.
MEG: Not hers. So what would that be?
SHAWN: So here’s an interesting part about this. The guardian ad litem’s bills are something that you can audit as the parent. You get access to that. You can see what the guardian ad litem was billing on. The first thing you want to look for is a single entry showing that that guardian ad litem ever met the children. Because that’s the whole gig: a relationship with the kids. And there are Supreme Court rules regarding that. The next thing you want to look for is how much of what they did is a wire, and how much happened in real life.
MEG: Yes. So, for instance, on mine, I highlighted “email,” “email,” “call,” and I made sure it was all highlighted to show that.
SHAWN: Yeah. These folks, basically, what they do is, under the remote work policies that we now have in place, they sit back in their office and they bill $250 an hour to basically look at their computer and rubber-stamp whatever everybody else is saying.
MEG: Absolutely.
SHAWN: They never form a relationship with the child in order to figure out what the child wants, or what’s in the best interest of the child. They never form a face-to-face relationship with any of the witnesses, and they may never even know the people that are referring them cases.
MEG: Huh. That’s a [unclear] thing.
SHAWN: Now, if you’re just a known name circulating in email inboxes, this guardian ad litem may spend the entirety of their time… They may bill $500,000 in a year and physically go to court five, six times.
MEG: Yep.
SHAWN: All of it’s wires. And so what you want to look for on these bills is how much of this is a wire, up in the cloud. Who knows if it’s true? Who knows whether it’s a real fact or not? And how much is this person doing their actual job?
MEG: Yep.
SHAWN: Let me give you a famous example of wire fraud: Enron.
MEG: Enron. Okay. The Enron scandal.
SHAWN: The Enron scandal. You might think to yourself, what do trading and securities have to do with family law? Well, what they did with Enron is similar to what family courts are doing now. With Enron, everybody pointed at everybody else. The accountants pointed at the lawyers and said, “Well, the lawyers assured me that they were doing their job.” The lawyers pointed at the accountants and said, “Well, I read the accounting reports. I assumed the accountants were doing their jobs.” The administrators pointed at the lawyers and the accountants and said, “Well, I took those numbers at face value.” And so now, with remote work, everybody in this cast of characters is circulating information coming from two very unreliable people.
MEG: Yeah.
SHAWN: These people have some beliefs, and the first people who should screen those beliefs before they get filed, pursuant to reasonable fees, are the lawyers. They’re not supposed to be filing stuff, even if their client wants it, if it’s not true and accurate.
MEG: So that’s one thing I found when I went through my divorce with my ex. He went through five or six attorneys, because those were good attorneys. They would not do what he wanted, which was to take my children away from me. So they just kept quitting, left and right, because those were good attorneys who actually wanted to be good people. And then you have those other attorneys. All they want is money. And these people absolutely exist.
SHAWN: Oh, absolutely.
MEG: Yeah. And what they do then is keep spinning, so they get more money. They’ll file whatever, because guess what happens when you file something? Then they can both argue, and that’s more money for them.
SHAWN: So here’s something I will tell you is very common, that has arisen now. Lawyers in family court, they will take $50,000 to rebut false information, but they will not take $5 to file a motion to enjoin the opposing counsel from filing false information.
MEG: That is true.
SHAWN: They don’t do that. They will not say to a judge, “Look, under the rules of civil procedure, you need to enjoin this lawyer from filing false information.” That happens all the time. They’ll take 50 grand to fight the false information, but they won’t sanction opposing counsel. That could be taken as evidence of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. You’re taking a circumstance where you’ve got two people, both of whom are highly problematic people, but under the ethical rules, they still get a reasonably priced divorce. And what they’re doing is, they’re artificially inflating their fees by having a silent agreement not to sanction one another.
MEG: Hmm. Just like attorneys won’t ask a judge to recuse himself.
SHAWN: Saul Goodman and Billy Flynn. Saul Goodman knows Billy Flynn defends murderers and that he lies about it. And Billy Flynn knows that Saul Goodman is a methamphetamine trafficker and that he lies, also. And that’s the gig. That’s what they’re doing. They’re artificially inflating things. They find people with resources, like Robert Baratheon and Cersei Baratheon, and they file what those people ask them to file. And boom: that’s how a $200,000, $300,000 divorce happens.
MEG: $500,000, like mine.
SHAWN: Now, the rest of the cast of characters knows Judge Conahan. Judge Conahan was convicted in federal court of this. He knew what he was doing. So this is not a theoretical issue. Dr. Lecter, this physician: there’s probably a reason why Dr. Lecter is in private practice in family court and not on staff at a major university. There’s a reason that the tele-guardian ad litem is sitting on a beach somewhere, looking at their computer.
The thing about family law is, you have some practitioners who are absolutely amazing people, who are passionate about what they do, work their hardest, take on difficult cases, and push the system forward.
MEG: That’s absolutely true.
SHAWN: And I would argue that’s the majority of practitioners. But you have people in there…
MEG: Not the ones that keep spinning in court. The same people use the same ones over and over again.
SHAWN: You have some people in family court who are in family court because they can commit crimes.
MEG: Yep. And they’re protected, right?
SHAWN: And that’s why we’re getting into billing.
MEG: So this week we’re doing billing. And then what’s next after that? What other things should people start thinking about putting together for the next few weeks of the season?
SHAWN: We’re going to go over billing, and then we’re going to start to go over crimes: how to find a statute, how to meet the elements, how to investigate, how to report. There’s so much intersection between family law, civil law, and crime. And this is supposed to be informational, not just for people who are victims, but for their attorneys, for law enforcement officers, and prosecutors. I think that if this show were published to a law enforcement officer, a prosecutor, a family law attorney, or even used in a filing in court, the things I intend to teach should hold up to that scrutiny.
MEG: Okay. So we’re going to start doing a fun new feature. When you guys watch this, I want you to ask a question, and I’ll randomly pick a few questions for the next time we’re doing a show together, and I’ll ask Shawn those questions. And then, go ahead: let’s see who can figure out the next actor that we should talk about. We could do a CPS worker, we could do a… Come on, Shawn, help me out here.
SHAWN: Well, I want to finish… a therapist… auditing the bills, because once I teach everybody how to audit bills, then they’re in a position to be truly dangerous.
MEG: Is this just against court actors, or can it be…? You know, let’s say her sister is helping her ex, and they’re conspiring, too, with the attorneys. Are private parties a part of this?
SHAWN: So yes. Conspiracy to commit wire fraud is conspiracy to commit wire fraud. There’s no magic “I can’t be charged with that” shield.
MEG: Okay.
SHAWN: And so, family members especially… I will tell you, Meg, that in criminal law, it’s incredibly difficult to manage the expectations of family, because they’re all witnesses, and sometimes they’re co-conspirators.
MEG: Absolutely. A lot of times.
SHAWN: So a situation I frequently find myself in is, my client is in custody, or my client is charged with a crime. They want me to talk to the family. I can’t talk to the family, because the state or I might actually send a subpoena to the family and force them to come testify at trial. They might have to raise their Fifth Amendment right to remain silent over the things that they did and said.
MEG: Wow. That reminds me of the Read case, where they all came in and said they plead the Fifth, and none of them had to testify.
SHAWN: Right. And if you’re thinking about having a jury trial in family court, if you can get witnesses to raise their Fifth Amendment right to remain silent in front of a jury, well, the jury can infer that they’re not commenting because they’d be talking about committing crimes.
So to a degree, if you are a family court practitioner, an attorney, or you’re a litigant, and you say, “I want a jury trial in my family court,” and you think that a family member is a co-conspirator or committing a crime, and it’s relevant to the case, you can call them. And then they are confronted with the circumstance where they either have to refuse to comply with a lawful subpoena, which can get them held in contempt; or they go up there and say what they actually did, and now that they’ve said it under oath, they could be charged with a crime; or they get up there and lie, even though you have evidence, and they get charged with perjury; or they go up there and raise their Fifth Amendment right to remain silent. All of which is good for the victim of the crime, if there’s a jury trial.
MEG: If there’s a jury trial.
SHAWN: Which is impossible here in Kansas, but I want to change that.
MEG: So you’re saying… we’re all learning how to write these complaints and put them in with the FBI and all those agencies. So you’re telling me we can include the private actors on there, to talk about what they did to conspire with the other court actors?
SHAWN: A conspiracy is a conspiracy. The federal government did not place a limit on the number of people who could be in a conspiracy. It just has to be two or more. I have worked cases where there have been upwards of 30 people charged by the Department of Justice in a conspiracy.
And what I’ll tell you is that there are two types of criminal organizations. There are the kinds that you can dismantle: small organizations. You can go in, you can charge five, six, 10, 15, 20 of them, and once they’re charged and indicted and convicted, that criminal conspiracy is gone. But then there are criminal conspiracies that all you can really do is disrupt. And that’s getting to be what some of these large-scale organizations are. That’s your Sinaloa cartel. That’s your Mexican Mafia. Those are organizations where you can indict a large group of people, and all you’ve really done is disrupt the actions of that conspiracy. You didn’t take it out.
And the reason that jury trials are important: who thinks they’re going to get a fair bench trial out of this fella, right? You’re not going to get a fair bench trial out of this guy, because he knows all these people. He has them in his court all the time. To an extent, retention, judicial retention, depends entirely on the popularity of the bar.
MEG: That’s true. Absolutely. So I’m going to read over a few of these. A lot of people ask, “Where do we report fraud?” And this is on our website, where you can download it, and it has all of them. It has the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which is the FBI, and the Federal Trade Commission. What’s the short for that? Do they have a short…
SHAWN: FTC.
MEG: FTC, the Federal Trade Commission. There are two on here. Theft, and what’s FTC… oh, one’s just the ID theft. And then there’s the [unclear], and the Internal Revenue Service, the IRS.
SHAWN: You can report there, too. So, yeah, you have to be a little bit of a law nerd to appreciate this, but the FBI is not the only game in town. The IRS, they would consider all the money that this criminal enterprise is making to be laundered. So Robert and Cersei, they need their divorce, but they’re due reasonable fees, and this criminal conspiracy exists to artificially inflate those fees. Well, you can’t make money committing felonies and not pay taxes on it. It’s dirty money. So you’re laundering that money, which means that for all these bad actors, you could conceivably file an IRS complaint. And the IRS is its own agency, and so they’ll work it up from their angle.
MEG: I love that. Internet Crime Complaint Center.
SHAWN: There’s a lot of law enforcement agencies, technically, because this is all wires. It’s all patient portals, court portals, e-filing, digital signatures, emails, texts, calls, video conferences. It’s all wires, which means it’s cybercrime.
MEG: Yeah. So we even have Social Security administrators. I mean, this goes front and back. Department of Justice, Criminal Trustees Program. Postal Inspection Service.
SHAWN: So people don’t know this, but the United States Postal Service has special agents. They are federal law enforcement agents. So if you send a bill in the mail, or a medical report, or a court order, and it’s the product of fraud, that’s mail fraud, and a special agent from the United States Postal Service will come in. And that’s important because, let’s say the FBI doesn’t pick it up, and the FBI frequently misses crimes. The Postal Service might pick it up.
MEG: Hmm. Yeah, it’s funny, because we all know about the DOJ or FBI, but if you really look at all of this, there’s a lot. The only reason we know this is because of you. But this is why it’s important for you guys to take the time to go read all these. They explain under each one what they do and how they do it, and a lot of them are online forms.
SHAWN: Yeah. I’ll tell you another one: the Secret Service. People don’t know this: they have a cybercrime unit.
MEG: Wow. We’re going to be doing episodes every week, all right? We’re excited for more time with you, Shawn. And we’re also excited to have people ask questions, find another court actor, and go find your invoices so we can show it up. Next up, we’re going to have Shawn show you, with an invoice, exactly what to do and what to highlight. So that’s next. Watch now.
SHAWN: So this is an invoice. This is an example of a blank invoice, and I used my own invoice so that I could show you all ethical billing. So you have a right to reasonable fees, which means it’s not supposed to cost more than it should. And there’s a process for how billing is done.
So at the very top of the invoice: first off, it’s a paper invoice. You’re giving somebody something to hold on to, a piece for their file. Not everybody does paper invoices, but I do. You’ve got the name of the company, you’ve got the address for the company, you’ve got the website for the company, and the phone and the email are at the website. You have the invoice, and you have the date of the invoice. Then you have the name of the client, the address of the client, the city, state, and zip code of the client, and the case number. Now, down in here, we go over entries. Today’s date would be July… what day is today?
MEG: Today’s July 12th.
SHAWN: July 12th. So we’re going to have to provide a description. Now, we don’t want to provide attorney-client privileged information in our description, but we have to put enough of a description in there so people know what we billed for.
“Research 18 U.S.C. § 1343 in relation to wire from Cersei Baratheon on July 11, 2026.” That’s a good-looking entry. It doesn’t tell you what’s in the wire, but it tells you that I researched a statute and that it was in relation to a piece of evidence that occurred on July 11th. That took a 0.5, which comes out to $250.
Now, let’s do another entry. “July 12th: Sent email to opposing counsel regarding theory of 18 U.S.C. § 1343.” That’s a 0.1, so I billed $50. July 12th, I got to go to court. It’s time to go to court and see the judge. “Court time”: 0.5, $250. But also, there’s travel, and I got to interview a witness. “July 12th: Interview witness, Cersei’s brother Jaime, by phone.” And that is a 0.2, so $100. And then travel: “Travel to and from court,” 0.5. It’s just right down the street. So right here, we have an invoice showing some billable entries. We have a total of $900.
Now, these are wires. These three entries are wires. If I use these entries to commit a fraud on this court, that could be wire fraud and obstruction of justice. And if they’re separate acts, if this was wire fraud, then it could be three counts of wire fraud. And if they’re eligible for elevated penalties, that’s $3 million.
Now, let’s go into our expenses. Mileage: we only spent a little bit of time driving. Let’s say we drove 10 miles, office to court. Okay, so we’ve got our dates, but we also had to send some postage. I had to write a letter. Okay, these are expenses. You can’t upcharge on your expenses, but you can get paid for your expenses. Your lawyer needs to keep track of expenses, and those expenses need to be laid out very clearly. And when you go through the file, you need to be able to find those expenses.
Now, here’s where wire fraud comes into play. If you’re a virtual lawyer or a virtual guardian, you’re not going to have any expenses, because all you’re doing is emailing, calling, and texting people, and maybe doing some portals. So let’s say our expenses: our mileage is $7.20, and our costs are an even $10. Then we have billed $917.20. There’s an invoice.
We, as a law office, did this work. We researched a law. We sent an email to opposing counsel regarding the theory of the law. We spent some time in court. We interviewed a witness, Cersei’s brother Jaime, by phone. And then we traveled to and from court. $900 worth of work, $7.20 worth of mileage, $10 worth of costs: a total of $917.20. Let’s say that the client made a $1,000 payment. We can go and deduct $917.20 from that $1,000 payment. We can do so ethically. However, if there’s no invoice and money got taken out of the trust account, that can be an ethical violation. If I take out more than $917, that can be an ethical violation. If I took out money before the invoice was completed, thinking I would do the invoice later, that could be a violation of the trust account.
Now, where this becomes essential is if one of my expenses, or one of the payments I made, was to one of the other court actors, such as a referral fee to opposing counsel, a referral fee to the guardian ad litem, a referral fee to the teletherapist, the tele-guardian ad litem. Those could be construed as kickbacks and financial conflicts of interest. So you need to go and get all your invoices. And if your attorneys, GALs, therapists, and everybody else this judge is ordering you to pay don’t have invoices, that’s clue one that you potentially have a case of wire fraud.
Once you have all your invoices, and you’ve audited all your invoices, go and look for how much of it is wires. If you’ve got $50,000 worth of wires, but you only went to court for five minutes, then potentially you are the victim of wire fraud. If you’ve got $50,000 worth of wires and you never set foot in a court of law, potentially you are the victim of wire fraud. If you have $50,000 worth of legal billing, you never set foot in a court of law, you never met anybody else outside of your computer, and everything in controversy is all emails, texts, and portals in your computer, then potentially you’re the victim of wire fraud.
What you can do, if you’re a criminal, is generate false information in order to artificially inflate your own fees, or to bill for fees that are not necessary. So this is how you bill for your services. Go and get your invoices.
MEG: So thanks for watching the Stand With Meg Show. I’m Meg, and this is…
SHAWN: I’m Shawn, and I think there’s less criminals in criminal law than in family law.
MEG: And that’s the truth, ain’t it? So, I’m Meg, with Stand With Meg. Voice for the voiceless.
SHAWN: Yes, we are.
MEG: All right. Stand with Meg.