Aaron Spolin, a Princeton-trained lawyer and former McKinsey consultant who signed up thousands of detained clients seeking release under new criminal justice reform laws, has been hit with a second round of charges by the State Bar of California last week.
The 18 counts filed Thursday follow an initial filing of disciplinary charges in August and provide more examples of how the bar claims Spolin and his Westside firm used deceptive marketing and outright lies. simple to convince desperate families to hire him.
One alleged violation involved a 2023 press release on Spolin’s website announcing that Gov. Gavin Newsom had commuted the sentence of one of his clients. In fact, the man told The Times last year that he made the switch on his own and that Spolin had done no work on it. At the time, Spolin’s company was urging families to pay more than $9,000 to obtain a commutation, a path that experts say has only a tiny chance of success.
In another case cited by the bar, a lawyer working for Spolin told a Los Angeles man, Wesner Charles Jr., who was serving a 27-year-to-life sentence for attempted carjacking and robbery, that a reform law could “bring him out”. in six to eight months.
Spolin charged the family $19,000 without informing them that Charles and others convicted of violent crimes did not qualify for consideration. The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office had written “no fewer than nine letters” to Spolin informing him that such cases “would not be pursued,” wrote Cindy Chan, a supervising attorney in the bar’s chief prosecutor’s office. .
Charles, who maintained his innocence, was later released with the help of another lawyer.
The rest of the new allegations involve three other incarcerated Los Angeles men whose families paid between $11,500 and $21,700 for unsuccessful legal services.
If convicted, Spolin, 39, faces penalties ranging from probation to disbarment by the state Supreme Court.
An attorney for Spolin, Erin Joyce, previously told the Times that her client “has fully cooperated with the state bar and will continue to cooperate.” He hopes to resolve this issue in the near future.
In a court filing last month, Joyce wrote that bar attorneys had informed her that “they intended to pursue a serial [Spolin]bringing several cases successively. She acknowledged that a criminal investigation was underway by the state attorney general into Spolin’s practices, but denied that he committed any crimes.
She wrote that “for more than a year,” Spolin “has refused paid representation” for the type of conviction cases for which the bar has faulted him and that “he has also changed or deleted advertising statements from his cabinet…”
Spolin worked for the Bronx district attorney’s office before moving to Los Angeles and starting a practice focused on representing inmates under a series of laws intended to reduce mass incarceration.
He told The Times last year that he used techniques he learned as a consultant at McKinsey to streamline his business. He ran his practice from a coworking space, used legal document templates, and paid lawyers from the Philippines and other developing countries at an hourly rate of about $10.
