A lawyer who worked for disbarred and now-imprisoned attorney Tom Girardi‘s Los Angeles-based law firm pleaded guilty Thursday in Chicago to disobeying a court order that called for settlement funds to be distributed to relatives of victims killed in a plane crash.
Keith Griffin, 54, of Temple City, worked for the now-defunct personal injury law firm Girardi Keese, which represented relatives of victims who were killed in the 2018 Lion Air crash in the Java Sea.
Girardi Keese filed civil lawsuits in federal court in Chicago against the plane’s manufacturer, Boeing Co., and settled the suits in 2020. In connection with the settlements, a federal judge ordered that the settlement funds, which included a total of $7.5 million, be sent to each client as soon as practicable.
Although Boeing wired the settlement funds into Girardi Keese’s client trust account in March 2020, Griffin admitted in a plea agreement that he knew for the next eight months that the firm failed to distribute the full amount of money to the clients, in violation of the judge’s order and despite the clients’ repeated inquiries and demands for the money.
Griffin stated in the plea agreement that on multiple occasions he confronted Girardi himself about paying the money to the clients. Griffin knew, however, that Girardi was not distributing those funds as required by the court order over that eight-month period, the plea agreement states.
The Lion Air victims eventually received their settlement funds when another law firm’s insurer paid them.
Girardi, 86, of Seal Beach, was convicted in 2024 by a federal jury in Los Angeles of embezzling millions of dollars in settlement funds from other clients. In connection with his sentencing, prosecutors told the court that Girardi had misappropriated the Lion Air funds.
Girardi, who was found to suffer from dementia, is currently serving more than seven years at the Federal Medical Center in Rochester, Minnesota.
Two other Girardi Keese employees were charged in Chicago as part of this investigation.
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The firm’s former chief financial officer, Chris Kamon, 51, of Palos Verdes, pleaded guilty last year in Chicago to a wire fraud charge for helping Girardi embezzle the victims’ settlement funds. Kamon was sentenced to more than five years in federal prison, which will run concurrently to a 10-year sentence that Kamon received in Los Angeles federal court for a related embezzlement scheme.
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