Gillers said Mui’s admissions in the disciplinary proceeding could be used against him and the firm in the legal malpractice suit. The suit’s non-existence was revealed when a lawyer friend of Reid’s sought information on the case’s status from the judge’s clerk. Mui told Reid the case was before Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Debra James, according to the suspension order. “They have not cooperated at all in discovery.” “I’m going to ask the judge to allow me to file a motion for sanctions against them,” Mui told Reid in an email cited in the disciplinary proceeding. Over the next two years, the lawyer spun elaborate tales to his client about proceedings and filings that didn’t actually happen, adopting an exasperated tone in discussing the imaginary discovery dispute with ICAP. In late 2017, Mui told Reid the FINRA case was not progressing and suggested filing a lawsuit, the disciplinary investigation found. Throughout the following year, Mui repeatedly told his client he had filed to initiate an arbitration proceeding with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, even though he didn’t actually submit the filing until July 2017. In his suit, Reid says he earned an average of $2.2 million in each of his last five years at ICAP and believes his damages from his wrongful termination total around $8 million.Īccording to the suspension order, Reid retained Sack & Sack in 2015 to pursue litigation against his former employer. The firm in 2018 agreed to pay $50 million to resolve the matter. Shalov said the investigation concerned alleged manipulation of the ISDAfix interest-rate derivative benchmark. Reid says in his suit that he joined ICAP’s medium-term swaps desk in Jersey City in 2007 and was illegally fired in October 2014 because he cooperated with a Justice Department and Commodity Futures Trading Commission probe of the firm’s trading practices. “This is pretty bad behavior,” said Gillers. Stephen Gillers, a legal ethics professor at New York University, said a six-month suspension seemed “incredibly lenient” for a lawyer who lied to his client to the extent Mui did. His current lawyer, Lee Shalov, provided details about his client’s claims but didn’t respond to requests for comment on Mui’s suspension. Reid didn’t respond to emails and calls seeking comment. Mark Anesh and Jamie Wozman, the lawyers who represented Mui in the disciplinary proceeding and are also defending him and Sack & Sack against Reid’s legal malpractice suit, declined to comment. Mui didn’t respond to email and phone messages seeking comment.
In recommending suspension, the disciplinary committee said it had taken into account Mui’s “anxiety and stress” at the time of his actions and his “genuine remorse for his unethical choices.” Last week, the suit that never was resulted in the six-month suspension of Mui’s law license, with the lawyer admitting his misconduct in a state disciplinary proceeding. According to Reid, the statute of limitations now barred claims he could have asserted against his former employer. “By then, the damage had been done,” Reid said in an actual lawsuit filed last year against Mui and the law firm where he works, New York’s Sack & Sack. Reid finally found out in February 2020 that the lawyer, Michael Mui, had never filed it at all. None of it was true, including the existence of the suit itself. Then the lawyer claimed that he had begun settlement talks.
Months later, the lack of progress was attributed to a discovery dispute.
At first his lawyer said a hearing date in New York was moved because it had been mistakenly scheduled on a Jewish holiday. Years later though, Reid still hadn’t had his day in court. (Bloomberg) - Fired in 2014 from an ICAP Plc job that he says was paying him more than $2 million a year, swaps broker Bruce Reid was eager to hit back with a wrongful termination claim.
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