Lewis Brisbois Co-Founder Accused of Embezzlement of the Firm’s Funds for Personal and Family Financial Gain

Lewis Brisbois Leaders Hoarded Firm Assets, Misused Client Funds, Ex-COO Alleged in 2019 Letter

“Firm Co-Founder and Chairman Bob Lewis appeared to run this massive partnership as if the Firm was still a ‘mom and pop’ operation still controlled by Bob Lewis,” former COO Robert Kamins wrote of the alleged improprieties in how the Am Law 100 firm was managed.

MAY 19, 2023 | REPUBLISHED BY LIT: JUL 12, 2023

The University of California announced on Thursday that it has stopped referring new work to Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith LLP @LewisBrisbois after the firm released internal emails exposing offensive language and derogatory remarks exchanged between two former senior partners.

— lawsinusa (@lawsinusa) August 11, 2023

What You Need to Know

In 2019, Lewis Brisbois’ former COO submitted a letter to California state authorities alleging several forms of financial improprieties by senior leaders.

The former COO, now holding the same position at newly launched Barber Ranen, claims he was fired after raising concerns internally. Other employees were subjected to retaliation for similar conduct, the letter notes.

A former executive at Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith accused senior leadership of spreading financial perks to insiders without partnership consent and deliberately not collecting end-of-year accounts receivable in order to limit equity partner pay, among other questionable practices, according to a Private Attorneys General Act claim from 2019.

The letter, first reported by the Daily Journal on Tuesday, comes to light amid a leadership shake-up at the firm, including the resignation of founder and longtime chairman Bob Lewis and the election of a national managing partner by an expanded management committee.

Leadership changes were prompted by the departure of Lewis Brisbois’ former employment department leaders, who started a new firm and have recruited more than 120 lawyers from their previous firm.

The alleged improprieties reported by Lewis Brisbois’ former Chief Operating Officer Robert Kamins shared a common thread.

“Even though the Firm is an Am Law 100 Firm with over one hundred equity partners and over one thousand lawyers, Firm Co-Founder and Chairman Bob Lewis appeared to run this massive partnership as if the Firm was still a ‘mom and pop’ operation still controlled by Bob Lewis,” the letter states.

“In fact, legally, it was not,” the letter continues. “Bob Lewis retained a small minority stake in the Firm as an equity partner, but his equity stake did not entitle him to control the Firm. Yet, as a day-to-day matter, he operated the Firm as if it was his own in continued violation of his duties to his partners.”

Reached for comment about the letter on Thursday, a Lewis Brisbois spokesperson disputed the allegations, pointing out that no action was taken by the California Labor and Workforce Agency following the notice.

The spokesperson also noted that Kamins is serving as chief operating officer at the firm recently launched by the former leaders of Lewis Brisbois’ employment practice.

“Lewis Brisbois finds it troubling that these four-year-old allegations have resurfaced at the same time, that according to a legal media outlet, Mr. Kamins is working with the Barber Ranen law firm,” the firm spokesperson said in a statement.

The American Lawyer obtained a copy of the 2019 letter through a formal request to the state’s Department of Industrial Relations.

Kamins, who declined to comment for this report, is currently a principal and founder of law firm consultancy Vertex Advisors, which leaders at Barber Ranen said in a recent interview is overseeing human resources, information technology and other administrative functions at the new firm. Kamins is acting as COO of Barber Ranen, the leaders said.

The letter comes to light in the wake of the recent mass departure to form Barber Ranen. One day after leaders at the new firm went public, Lewis Brisbois announced Bob Lewis would step down as co-chairman, and it would form an expanded management committee. A week later, the firm elected new management members and installed a new managing partner.

Sources with knowledge of the firm have questioned the nature of Lewis’ removal, but several have said that Lewis had a heavy hand in the management of the firm. One source described Lewis as “the 800-pound gorilla of the firm” since its inception in 1979.

Firm leaders said Lewis will continue to serve on the firm’s management committee through the end of his term on Dec. 31.

In response to the “mom and shop” characterization in the 2019 letter, a Lewis Brisbois spokesperson said in a statement, “to the extent Mr. Kamins’ letter implies that we are a family run business—we respond with an emphatic yes!”

“We are extraordinarily proud of our family-oriented culture and point out that many of our lawyers and business professionals have spouses and children who work at our firm,” the spokesperson said. “We would not have it any other way. Moreover, we have risen from a ‘mom and pop’ shop to over 1,600 lawyers in 55 cities precisely because we treat our employees and clients like family.”

Lewis’ sons have held leadership positions at the firm.

Steven Lewis, a products liability partner and co-managing partner of the Los Angeles office, is serving on the firm’s management committee. Tommy Lewis has served as deputy chief information officer of the firm and, according to his LinkedIn profile, currently serves as chief technology officer.

The six-page letter filed on April 22, 2019, stated that after Kamins raised alarm bells about some of the firm’s financial practices, he was pressured to resign and subsequently fired when he refused to resign.

It claims that Kamins discovered “questionable practices which he reasonably believed violated the law,” and alleges that following his termination, the firm “continued to make operational changes that—rather than stopping the unlawful conduct—have further solidified the control of the Firm in the hands of those who are behind the unlawful conduct.”

The Joker: Lewis Brisbois Shane Kotlarsky’s Motion for Sanctions Refers to the Texas Lawyers Creed – Laws In Texas https://t.co/LAo4vImnmh

— lawsinusa (@lawsinusa) July 13, 2023

Kamins was not the only employee subjected to retaliation for similar conduct, the letter notes.

While other aggrieved employees are not mentioned by name in the complaint, Lewis Brisbois continued to see departures among its administrative leadership following Kamins’ departure from the firm in August 2018.

Former chief information and practice officer Michael Prohias left in November 2018 and former chief information security officer Frank Gillman left in 2019, both joining the consultancy Vertex, according to LinkedIn.

Lewis Brisbois’ last national managing partner, Tim Graves, left the firm in 2020 due to disagreements with firm leadership and has since joined Barber Ranen as its CEO.

As to the contents of the letter, Kamins claimed that Lewis and other insiders at Lewis Brisbois were involved in a wide-range of financial improprieties, including the potential embezzlement of firm assets, fraudulent use of software without the legally required licenses, kickbacks from vendors, potential misappropriation of partnership assets and client trust funds, breaches of fiduciary duty and failure to comply with reporting requirements.

Kamins alleged that Lewis and son Tommy Lewis, who served as deputy chief information officer at the time, “were embezzling and/or converting firm assets to personal use through exploitation of corporate rewards points and gift cards accrued as a result of millions of dollars of firm purchases.”

The letter goes on to describe opaque financial practices, including “deliberately” avoiding financial planning and budgeting and holding assets in “mysterious bank accounts spread between two banks,” one for all deposits and another for all payments.

The letter states that Kamins was concerned that Lewis was embezzling such funds or otherwise using them for personal gain.

“Hundreds of thousands of dollars” in reimbursements to Lewis’ son Tommy are also described in the letter, along with “suspicious patterns of purchase and returns” by the younger Lewis. The letter says, “Bob Lewis appeared to spread financial perks to those close to him without consent or knowledge of the partnership.”

The letter also describes kickbacks to vendors, including using son Craig Lewis for a number of vendor services, allegedly a violation of California commercial bribery statutes.

It describes “questionable” year-end practices that, according to the letter, suggest Bob Lewis took steps to avoid recognizing funds in the relevant tax year, thus underreporting income in violation of tax laws, breaching fiduciary duties to partners by denying compensation in that particular tax year.

“Insiders of the firm had advance knowledge of what the year-end Firm figures would be well before the year actually closed and, contrary to the regular practices at law firms of aggressively seeking to make year-end collections … the Firm appeared to intentionally fail to make year-end collections that were capable of being collected,” the letter states.

Kamins also reported potential misuse of client trust fund money for payroll or partner distributions, according to the letter.

Employee privacy was also being violated, primarily through Tommy Lewis, Kamins alleged, by engaging in spying and “privacy-intrusive tactics,” some of which were implemented without the awareness of firm leadership, the letter says.

Since the beginning of the year, more than 150 lawyers have parted ways with the firm, including a 44-person cybersecurity group and the employment lawyers, prompting the firm’s abrupt restructure of its governance and management personnel.

“The attorneys who left Lewis Brisbois have said they want to create their own culture, with values and vision that were different from those Lewis Brisbois holds dear,” the firm’s spokesperson said. “We will continue to focus on our firm and providing the excellent legal representation that our clients have come to expect from Lewis Brisbois.”