Insatiable Appetite

Analyzing Lori Deveny and the Oregon State Bar’s receipts

In advance of her sentencing in federal court, the U.S. Attorney filed a document showing the extent of the theft committed by now-convicted former attorney Lori Deveny.

The spreadsheet* shows 135 victims (whose names are redacted) and several of the Oregon State Bar’s pay-outs made through the Client Security Fund — a Bar program designed to reimburse victims of dishonest lawyers.

Let’s take a closer look at the numbers:

It was a years-long smash and grab, perpetrated against victims with cognitive difficulties.

Deveny paid the Marine Corps veteran in rolls of quarters now and then.

Here’s how victims can file a claim with the Bar.

Deveny stole a lot of money.

There are also a handful of CSF claims being delayed by the Bar, for unknown reasons.

Deveny will serve 8.5 years for her federal crimes.

All the crimes were certainly hard to keep track of.

Are there yet other accounts that we don’t know about?

This former client’s claim is still being denied by the Bar.

Deveny should be required to pay it all back.

There are suggestions for how Oregon Women Lawyers could help, if they wanted to.

For years, I’ve kept my own spreadsheet, which I hand-built, having cobbled it together from the scraps of information released by the Oregon State Bar in their Board of Governor’s agendas — records related to their handling of CSF claims, and their custodianship over Deveny’s former law practice. My task was complicated by the fact that the Bar stopped freely providing certain public records once they learned that I was mining them for information related to Deveny. The Bar now asserts that they no longer keep a spreadsheet of CSF claims — an assertion which cannot possibly be true. Licensees should be concerned about the lack of transparency that the Bar has displayed in regards to their handling of all things Deveny.

*** UPDATE: I was just poking around the Bar’s website, looking at their most recent Board of Governor’s meeting agenda, for the Budget and Finance Committee, and apparently the Bar supplied the U.S. Attorney with out-of-date financial information related to the CSF claims that the Bar has paid out. The new information conflicts with the bad info to the tune of approximately $671,000. That’s kind of a huge problem:

Why did the Oregon State Bar give the U.S. Attorney bad information?