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Bank Sued Over Court Filing Containing Lawyers' Personal Information

April 17, 2019

The New Jersey Law Journal reported on April 11th that partners in a New Jersey law firm are seeking damages from a bank that allegedly revealed private information about the partners on a court docket. Kurt Olender and Michael Feldman claim in a suit that Investors Bank filed motion papers revealing the partners’ home addresses, home telephone numbers, email addresses, and driver’s license numbers, as well as the account number for the law firm’s trust account and the full signatures of all of the authorized signatories for the account. If true, ouch!

The suit was filed in state court on March 8th and removed to federal court on April 9th. The private data was allegedly filed by Investors in a separate case in state court concerning a check deposited by the firm that was dishonored by the bank. The confidential information was removed after complaints by the plaintiffs’ firm, Olender Feldman of Summit, New Jersey, but it may have been viewed or downloaded by others, and could still be stored on the dark web, the suit claims.

The breach allegedly violated the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and two New Jersey statutes, the Consumer Fraud Act and the Identity Protection Act, as well as the rules of court. The plaintiffs seek compensatory, consequential, punitive, statutory and treble damages, as well as attorney fees and costs and five years of credit monitoring.

The alleged breach of privacy occurred when Olender Feldman filed another suit against Investors Bank in Superior Court in Union County, New Jersey. That suit, filed in July 2017, claimed Investors failed to detect that a cashier’s check for $487,601 that was deposited by Olender Feldman in its account was fraudulent.

The confidential information was included as an exhibit to a certification by Shaune Anthony Brown, a vice president of Investors Bank, which was filed along with a motion seeking additional time to answer the complaint. The motion and related documents were filed by Richard Weltman of the firm of Chuhak and Tecson in Totowa, New Jersey, representing Investors Bank.

Before it received the cashier’s check, Olender Feldman received an unsolicited email from a stranger seeking legal services, Investors Bank said in court papers. “Accepting what appeared to be extraordinary luck, Olender deposited the large cashier’s check in the firm’s bank account at Investors Bank,” the bank said. Before the check cleared, the stranger asked Olender Feldman to wire $228,900 to a bank account in Jakarta, Indonesia. The day after the wire transfer was made, Investors Bank contacted the law firm to state that the check was deemed fraudulent. Now where, oh where, have I heard this story before?

The bank immediately debited the Olender Feldman account for the $487,601 amount of the dishonored check, leaving the firm with a loss of $228,900. The firm asked the bank several times to reverse the charge back but the bank refused. Olender Feldman, which lists 19 attorneys on its website, claims in the state court case that the bank was negligent for failing to notify the firm that the check appeared suspicious.

The latest suit was removed to federal court by Weltman and another Chuhak & Tecson lawyer, Michele Jaspan, who did not respond to requests for comment about the litigation. An Investors Bank spokeswoman also did not respond to a request for comment. Michael Feldman of Olender Feldman, who represents his firm in both cases, said in an email, “As attorneys, and given the sanctity of a law firm’s attorney trust account in this State, we are shocked and saddened that an authorized attorney trust account bank in New Jersey could or would ever unilaterally seize funds belonging to unrelated clients because it believes a law firm owes it money. We will be even more disturbed if such behavior is ultimately permitted by our Supreme Court. If these actions are allowed to stand, clients in New Jersey may need to reconsider the risk of placing funds in an attorney trust account. In this case, Olender Feldman quickly replenished the funds unilaterally seized by Investors Bank from its attorney trust account so as to assure no possible harm to our clients.”

I am certainly no specialist in this area of law, but on the face of it, it seems extraordinary that a bank could unilaterally seize funds belonging to clients unrelated to this matter. But if someone wants to educate me further, the education would be welcome.

Feldman said that after his firm filed an amended complaint in the first case, asserting claim for the data breach, Investors was granted a motion to dismiss that claim after arguing that the individual partners were the proper claimants for the breach. That prompted the filing of the second lawsuit, he said.

“We expect that Investors Bank will now need to obtain new counsel due to what appears to be a clear conflict of interest between Investors Bank and the firm that filed the certification at issue without redacting same as the attorneys and Investors Bank each failed in their respective independent duties to assure that this personal and sensitive information was not publicly filed,” Feldman said in the email.

My British friends call this a cock-up. But it will be fun to watch.

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