A Tustin attorney faces disbarment for allegedly misappropriating as much as $282 million from as many as 60,000 clients who hired him for debt relief, the State Bar of California said.
Daniel Stephen March pleaded no contest to 27 ethics charges of moral turpitude, misappropriation, failure to maintain client funds in a trust account and others filed against him in May in State Bar Court, which independently handles attorney discipline cases.
“The level of misconduct and misappropriation of client funds by March is astonishing,” lead attorney George Cardona said in a statement from the State Bar on Tuesday. “March completely betrayed his responsibilities as a lawyer and his oath of service to his clients and the profession. Given the scope of his crimes, the just outcome in this case is disbarment.”
March operated a business in Tustin called Litigation Practice Group that offered debt relief services to clients for a flat fee, paid in monthly installments, and offered reimbursement if they couldn’t make payments. He filed for bankruptcy in March 2023.
But according to bankruptcy filings, up to $282 million in revenue was missing from advance fees collected through March from about 60,000 clients between November 2019 and March 2023, leaving just $1,500 in a JPMorgan Chase trust account and roughly a negative $1,000 in a Union Bank trust account. Attorneys are required to hold their clients’ fees in trust until the attorney completes the promised work, at the risk of being disciplined or disbarred.
Litigation Practice Group’s bankruptcy filings showed March made 20 separate deposits of monthly client fees into a trust account from March 2020 through September 2021, but then withdrew $78 million in client fees during that period, the Bar said in the statement. The fees — part of the $282 million total — were either never deposited into a trust account or remained there for only one day and were transferred to a personal account, the complaint alleges.
During the bankruptcy proceedings, March appeared to admit that his client's money had been mishandled, saying “no money or anything was held on behalf of the client,” according to the State Bar Court complaint.
“You are in the right hands to resolve your debt,” reads the Litigation Practice Group website. Google has marked the firm as permanently closed.
A separate State Bar Court complaint alleged that March failed to distribute nearly $1.4 million in settlement funds intended for a client and allowed his employee Tony Diab, a disbarred attorney, to manage the client’s funds. Diab was disbarred in 2019 after he was accused of lying to a client about multiple aspects of his criminal case and transferring $375,000 intended for his client’s severance settlement into his personal bank account, according to State Bar Court records. Diab failed to appear at his trial, was found in default and was subsequently disbarred.
A federal case filed by an investor in the Litigation Practice Group alleged that the firm abruptly stopped paying the investor in June 2022 and that Diab used March as a figurehead to practice law after losing his own license.
March had already been suspended from practicing law for 90 days in 2008. He was placed on probation for a year after failing to pay all of a client’s medical bills with the agreed-upon money and lying about it to his client, then offering to pay the rest of the bills as long as the client did not contact the state bar to complain, according to a 2008 complaint. He was required to write quarterly reports, attend ethics school and pass a professional responsibility exam as a condition of his probation.
March did not respond to phone calls or voicemails left at his personal or office numbers Wednesday.
