A man whose attorney went to prison after admitting she stole almost $290,000 from him has sued the lawyer’s onetime employer, a certified public accountant who allegedly recommended that he park hundreds of thousands of dollars in the lawyer’s escrow account as a tax-shelter measure.
The suit Andrew Clark filed last month in federal court accuses Kennesaw CPA Linda Ross of advising him to transfer more than $500,000 into now-disbarred attorney Kristin Richbourg’s IOLTA account in 2011. When Clark began having trouble contacting the lawyer, the suit said, Ross told him she had launched her own practice but still worked for the CPA. More than a year later, Ross admitted that Richbourg had long since been terminated from the accounting firm and “had not been used by Ross for nearly a year,” Clark claimed.
