Duped by lawyer's faked suits, attorney who operated litigation funding firm loaned her $400K
A New Jersey attorney who operates a litigation funding firm has won a $960,000 judgment in his home state against a Texas lawyer.
But it appears doubtful that Tim Foley, who owns American Asset Finance, will collect it.
“The damage has been done, and I don’t expect there to be justice,” he told the Houston Chronicle (sub. req.). “I really don’t think the company is going to survive.”
At issue in both that civil case and a criminal prosecution now ongoing in Texas is the $400,000 that Foley says his company loaned Houston attorney Gwendolyn Climmons-Johnson. The problem was, the two personal injury cases that secured the loan didn’t exist, Foley and a Harris County prosecutor tell the newspaper.
A lawyer for Climmons-Johnson didn’t respond to the newspaper’s request for comment.
Climmons-Johnson, a law graduate of Texas Southern University, has been licensed to practice for more than 25 years. She was sentenced in June to an 8-year federal prison term in an apparently unrelated $2.4 million Medicare scheme, the Chronicle reports, and she was ordered to pay $970,000 in restitution.
