By Jeff Blumenthal – Reporter, Philadelphia Business Journal
A longtime lawyer with Gay Chacker & Mittin has been charged with diverting clients from the plaintiff personal injury firm for a decade to outside attorneys in exchange for a cut of their fees.
Neil I. Mittin, 64, of Huntingdon Valley, Pa, was charged Thursday with one count of mail fraud by federal prosecutors in Philadelphia.
He had his name on the door at Gay Chacker & Mittin for 38 years. The firm was co-founded by Edward Chacker, a former chancellor of the Philadelphia Bar Association, and is now called Gay & Chacker.
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Prosecutors said between 2008 and 2018, Mittin engaged in a scheme to steal numerous cases from his longtime firm by referring them to outside attorneys. Prosecutors said the impacted clients did not know he was referring the cases, nor did they ask for referrals.
Mittin concealed his actions from his colleagues at the firm by closing the files for those matters and making it appear in the firm’s records that there was no settlement or resolution and that the cases were not viable.
After the fraudulent referrals, prosecutors said the attorneys from the other firms represented those clients and paid Mittin a referral fee of between 33 and 40 percent of the contingency fees plus reimbursement of the costs incurred by Gay & Chacker. That added up to $10.8 million in financial recoveries for the clients and $4.2 million in legal fees and costs that was defrauded from Gay & Chacker.
