Legal Assistant Pleads Guilty to Soliciting Lies

The operator of a Ventura legal-assistance business has pleaded guilty to soliciting perjury and filing false evidence after he allegedly encouraged clients to forge signatures on court documents.

Richard French II, 47, operator of Assisted Legal Services, faces up to four years and eight months in prison when he is sentenced March 12 by Judge Frederick A. Jones of Ventura County Superior Court.

According to court documents, French encouraged three people--including two undercover operatives from the district attorney’s Consumer and Environmental Protection Unit--to forge the signatures of present or former roommates on court papers aimed at forestalling evictions.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Kim George Gibbons said prosecutors launched the undercover investigation after several people told Municipal Court judges that their names had been forged in eviction cases.

One of French’s clients, Wanda Louise Smiley, testified at his preliminary hearing that she went to his office in downtown Ventura in the hope of delaying or preventing her eviction from a condominium she rented in Camarillo.

French suggested having Smiley’s roommate, who had not been served with eviction papers, contest the eviction, Smiley testified. When Smiley told him that the roommate would refuse to get involved in the legal action, “he suggested that we fill out the papers for her and that I sign them,” Smiley testified. “He said it would be my word against hers whether it was her signature.”

The forgery came to light because the roommate, a Sheriff’s Department employee, had a separate lease with the landlord and was not being evicted, Gibbons said.

Two undercover agents later went separately to French’s firm. Each said she was being evicted and that a boyfriend who had lived with her had moved out of state, according to court records. In both cases, the agents testified, French encouraged them to forge the names of the boyfriends on court documents as a way to delay eviction.

Investigator Lorraine Koster testified that she paid French, who lives in Montecito, $55 for his help in fighting the eviction.

Gibbons said the undercover investigation was launched because Smiley and other clients of French’s service were admitted perjurers whose credibility on the witness stand might be challenged.

He said Smiley will not be prosecuted. “We feel that justice has been done,” he said.

A jury heard the case in December but was unable to reach a verdict on any of the nine counts originally charged, although Gibbons said jurors voted 11 to 1 for conviction on most of the charges. A new trial was supposed to begin Monday, but French pleaded guilty to the two charges on Friday.

Court records describe French as a paralegal and his firm is listed under that heading in the telephone directory, but he is more accurately described as a legal technician, said Fran Chernowsky, president of the Los Angeles Paralegal Assn.

She said paralegals work under the supervision of an attorney who can be disciplined by the State Bar for misconduct. Legal technicians work directly for the public.

Chernowsky said most legal technicians provide a needed service for people who cannot afford lawyers for simple matters such as uncontested divorces, evictions and bankruptcies. She said the Legislature has considered measures that would require licensing of legal technicians but none of the proposals have been enacted into law.

Gibbons said French is the only legal technician at Assisted Legal Services, but he has a number of researchers who comb court records for the names of people facing eviction and send them notices about the company’s services. Smiley testified that she learned of the service through a notice in the mail.