A majority of the Illinois Review Board has recommended a three-year suspension

Respondent began working at Vedder Price P.C., a large international law firm, as a summer associate in 2005. After being licensed to practice law, he remained at Vedder Price, became a shareholder in 2014, and continued practicing until his termination in October 2019. One of his clients was Fortress Investment Group, which provides finance and leasing services to airlines. Under its contracts with its customers, Fortress could pass its expenses, including legal fees, onto its customers.

Between January 2018 and September 2019, Respondent created and sent nine invoices to Fortress customers, including Azur Havaciliki A.S. (“Azur”) (a company that leased airplanes and had leasing agreements with Fortress), while knowing that those invoices sought payment for services in which Fortress already had paid. Based on those invoices, Fortress customers remitted almost $109,000 to Vedder Price. Those funds, Respondent admitted, belonged to Fortress.

As a part of his scheme, Respondent instructed the Vedder Price accounting department to reactivate a dormant account that had been assigned to his former client, the L. Martinez Construction Company; and he further instructed the accounting department to credit the payments made on the false invoices to the Martinez Construction account, which was done.

Around the same time, Respondent prepared a false invoice in the amount of $7,488 directed to another client, GA Tellesis, using the Martinez Construction account number on the invoice, which caused payment on the false invoice to be credited to that account.

As Respondent was creating and submitting false invoices, he sent requests to Vedder Price’s accounting department seeking payment from the reactivated Martinez Construction account purportedly to reimburse him for expenses. For example, he requested reimbursement of $2,140.18 for fees related to a “client event” and a “race day” event (Adm. Ex. 5); $2,599.99 for the purchase of a crossbow, purportedly as a gift for someone with whom he had gone on a hunting trip (Adm. Ex. 10; R. 52); $13,772.43 for airfare (Adm. Ex. 13); and $16,986.46 for first-class plane tickets to Moscow, which he did not use and for which he received a credit to his personal credit card. (Adm. Ex. 12; R. 60-61.)2 The reimbursement requests were fraudulent.

Based on those false reimbursement requests, Respondent personally received at least $79,790.43 in funds that belonged to Fortress and GA Tellesis.