Girardi son-in-law describes final shouting match

Former Girardi Keese attorney David R. Lira testified Thursday that his final long and loud showdown with his father-in-law, plaintiffs’ attorney Thomas V. Girardi, concerned failure to pay clients.

During a hearing in Chicago federal court to decide whether he should be held in contempt for his role in the failure to pay clients their settlement money over a deadly plane crash in Indonesia, Lira lashed out at Girardi.

Lira said he was increasingly frustrated by Girardi’s refusal to pay several clients their full settlements after the firm received money from Boeing Co.’s lawyers at Perkins Coie LLP in March 2020.

He said he entered Girardi’s office on a Saturday in June 2020 with a packet of office supplies, including keys to a Land Rover paid for by the firm, to resign. What followed, Lira said, was the fiercest argument they ever had.

It was also, according to Lira, the last time they talked.

“I said he has committed professional suicide by his handling of these cases, that it wasn’t his money and that everything he worked for was in jeopardy,” Lira said under questioning from his attorney, Edith R. Matthai, a partner with Robie & Matthai.

Lira said if Girardi didn’t have the money, “there were so many rich people who would help you out.”

The failure to pay his clients is “an embarrassment to everyone associated with him and is so damaging to my reputation,” Lira said.

Lira, who is married to Girardi’s daughter, said he told her father she “would be a direct victim of his actions.”

Matthai asked Lira if he called Girardi a “thief” during their confrontation.

He said yes. “I think he was shocked initially by my statements and that I was leaving,” the attorney said.

Girardi refused to accept the packet and his emails to Girardi Keese were not forwarded after his departure, Lira said.

Alexander G. Tievsky, a partner with Edelson PC, a co-counsel with Girardi Keese on the Lion Air case whose firm filed a motion to show cause alleging wrongdoing by Girardi, asked Lira why he called Girardi a thief.

“I would have called him anything under the sun to get him to pay the money,” Lira responded.

Girardi told him to think about his decision and not to do it, Lira testified. After his departure that day, “he left me 10 phone messages begging me to come back,” Lira added.

Lira told U.S. District Judge Thomas M. Durkin that he didn’t believe a plea to family would be terribly persuasive. He said Girardi was estranged from several family members and the only time he saw his four children was when he once took them to see the musical, “Hamilton.”

“I’m sorry to have to say this,” Lira said, noting his wife was likely watching his testimony online. “He put his reputation over family and friends.”

Tievsky asked Lira why he never told Edelson lawyers about his views during a call a few days later.

“That was private,” he testified of the conversation with Girardi. “I didn’t know your firm.”

Lira and former Girardi Keese attorney Keith D. Griffin are facing contempt charges to be decided by Durkin.

The judge repeatedly asked why no one reported the failure to pay all of the settlement money owed to the plaintiffs to him until December. In re: Lion Air Flight JT 610 Crash, 18-CV-07686 (N.D. Ill., filed Nov. 19, 2018).

Girardi, who now faces disbarment, invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to testify at the hearing. The judge has raised the question of his mental competence, with his brother filing papers saying he can no longer care for himself.

He and his firm are both in bankruptcy.

Griffin, Lira and Edelson managing partner Rafey S. Balabanian of San Francisco all said Girardi kept promising to “take care of it” when asked last year when the plaintiffs would receive all of the money.

But months passed. Lira quit the firm in June. Griffin resigned at the end of November. Girardi Keese paid more settlement money to most of the plaintiffs later in 2020 but not all of it.

Ryan D. Saba, a partner with Rosen Saba LLP who represents Griffin, pointed out that Edelson waited months before doing what it claimed Lira and Griffin should have done with the federal judge in charge of the Lion Air case.

“Would you agree with me, sir, that Mr. Girardi fooled you?” Saba asked Balabanian.

“Yes,” Balabanian replied.

Even though Edelson finally raised the issue in a December motion, Durkin said the firm, based in Chicago, also represented clients who weren’t paid for months.

“You may be in the soup too,” the judge told Tievsky of the Edelson firm.

He wanted to hear testimony from Edelson founder Jay Edelson and partner Ari Scharg and ordered another hearing before the end of the year.

“It’s an embarrassment to the whole legal community,” the judge said, noting that plaintiffs were begging to get the settlements they were owed to survive the COVID-19 pandemic.

The attorneys “may have been deferential to Tom Girardi, this so-called titan of the plaintiff’s bar,” Durkin said. “But these poor folks in Indonesia, they don’t care.”