A California attorney has been arraigned on charges of taking more than $350,000 in client funds. Ronald Norton Gottschalk, of Gottschalk & Associates in Arcadia, Calif., was charged on Sept. 23 with two counts of grand theft by embezzlement. He pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Prosecutors in the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office alleged that Gottschalk stole client funds twice: In 2005, they assert, he took $118,000 from a client who hired him to manage a deceased relative’s estate and, in 2007, he pocketed another $240,000 in settlement funds that belonged to nine clients in a civil lawsuit.
