By Susan Beck
As more eyes focus in on how lawyers use trust accounts to handle client funds, a rare prosecution of a lawyer for improperly filtering large sums through such an account is set to take place today.
A San Diego lawyer is scheduled to be sentenced Tuesday for improperly using IOLTA accounts, which are a special type of lawyer trust account, to illegally transfer money. The government has asserted that Richard Medina Jr. allowed nearly $12 million to be deposited into his IOLTA accounts to help mask the identity of customers in Mexico, the United States, and other countries who were moving money from the U.S. to overseas destinations. Medina pleaded guilty last September to operating an unlicensed money transmitting business and agreed to forfeit $12 million
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