"Work with our firm to ease your worries," attorney Stuart Sherman says at the website of his Farmington Hills law office.
Currently, the suburban lawyer has worries of his own, as Chad Halcom reports for Crain's.
Sherman could pay more than $335,000 to Troy-based Jacob & Weingarten PC, after jurors found he had committed conversion and embezzlement from the law firm he worked for shortly before his departure a year ago.Jurors in a week-long civil lawsuit trial before Oakland County Circuit Judge Michael Warren made that finding Monday over a $112,745 check that Sherman, a shareholder and treasurer at the firm until December 2012, wrote to himself. . . . The circuit court jury also found the firm was entitled to treble damages.
The civil judgment isn't a criminal conviction, Crain's notes.
Sherman, who lives in Birmingham and has been on the city commission there since 2005, tells Halcom that the check was for money he believed was his under a compensation formula that two other partners tried to change.
“Business disputes happen all the time. This is simply a partnership dissolution, and it should have been handled internally,” Sherman told Crain’s Tuesday. . . .
“I took only what I believed what I was entitled to in that dispute, and the jury saw it differently. . . . Sometimes these things get uglier than divorces, and that’s unfortunate.”
An attorney for his former firm says Sherman acted in the opposite way he was instructed.
“This payment to himself was in contravention of what the firm’s board had told him. . . . My client’s decision, in saying we’re not going to pay you, was contravened.”
The tax and estate planning attorney, who has two children, served as Birmingham's mayor in 2009.
-- Alan Stamm
