Law Firm Partner Charged After Pretending To Be A Lawyer For A Decade
‘My fake career! Nooooooooooo!’
But why bother wasting away in law school and law practice for all those years — and not to mention accumulating all of that debt — when you can just tell people you’re a lawyer?
That seems to be exactly what Kimberly Kitchen, a Pennsylvania woman who was recently elevated to the partnership of BMZ Law Offices, is accused of having done. We wrote about Kitchen last year when news of her alleged transgressions first broke, and now she’s been formally charged with forgery, unauthorized practice of law, and felony records tampering.
As we noted previously, Kitchen claimed to have graduated from Duquesne University School of Law in 2005, and then worked for BMZ Law for about 10 years before being promoted to partner in April 2014. She also claimed to have taught as a professor at Columbia Law School. Prior to these charges being brought, she claimed to have worked as a paralegal at Reed Smith for more than a decade on her LinkedIn profile (which has since been taken down). This is what her bio on the BMZ Law website used to look like:
Unfortunately for Ms. Kitchen, the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office just wasn’t buying what she was selling. Here are some additional details from NBC News:
Kitchen allegedly forged numerous documents attesting that she was a licensed attorney, including an attorney’s license for 2014, supposed bar examination results, supposed records of her law school attendance and a check purporting to show she’d paid her registration fees.Despite the fact that Kitchen had no attorney records on file with the state to speak of, that didn’t stop her from becoming president of the Huntingdon County Bar Association. Perhaps the only prerequisite for local bar membership in Pennsylvania is a pulse.
Duquesne University told NBC station WJAC of Johnstown in December, when the state investigation began, that it had no record of Kitchen’s having attended. The state attorney’s registration office shows no listing for her.
When partners at BMZ Law first caught wind of Kim Kitchen’s alleged lack of a law degree or bar admission, the firm released a statement: “Sadly, it would appear that our firm was the last, in a long line of professionals, to have been deceived by Ms. Kitchen into believing she was licensed to practice law.” The firm is currently going through all of the files she worked on to make sure nothing that was left in her unlearned hands was screwed up.
Kimberly Kitchen is looking at a few years in jail over this decade-long debacle. It’s a shame she didn’t specialize in criminal law, because she could have represented herself.
Huntingdon Co. woman charged for misrepresenting herself as a Commonwealth-licensed attorney [Pennsylvania Office of the Attorney General]
Pennsylvania Woman Charged After Making Partner With a Fake Law Degree [NBC News]
Pa. woman charged with forging docs to claim she was an attorney
[Pittsburgh Tribune-Review]
Authorities: Woman posed as lawyer for decade, named partner
[Seattle Post-Intelligencer]
Earlier: Oops! Law Firm Promotes Associate Who Likely Wasn’t A Lawyer To Partner
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