Lawyer With Past Sanctions Faces Fine for Double Filing

An Orange County lawyer, sanctioned by courts three times in the last five years and disciplined by the State Bar of California, has been fined for filing the same bankruptcy case twice and failing to withdraw one of the petitions.

Timothy J. McCandless of Costa Mesa said Tuesday that he will seek to vacate the latest sanction because he didn’t represent the debtors in the case. He said he helped them prepare and file the petitions, but that they were supposed to act as their own attorneys. He acknowledged that duplicate petitions were filed on June 5 and June 26.

The U.S. trustee’s office, which sought the sanctions, said in court papers that McCandless failed to respond to calls asking him to dismiss one of the cases. That failure led to a “needless waste of judicial resources,” the trustee’s office asserted.

McCandless also may face sanctions stemming from the trustee’s allegations 16 months ago that he filed sloppy paperwork and failed to investigate his clients’ claims before seeking bankruptcy protection for them. That case is pending before Bankruptcy Judge Lynne Riddle.

Some of those clients were involved in a Little Saigon credit-card scheme that federal authorities shut down in a series of raids last December. The federal action made a significant dent in a scheme that has cost banks nationwide more than $100 million.

The scheme relied on bankruptcy petitions to clear credit-card debts of more than $100,000 each incurred by people who had little or no income. McCandless filed many of the bankruptcy petitions for those people. He denied doing anything wrong or knowing of any wrongdoing his clients might have been engaged in.

McCandless has been sanctioned three times previously, according to State Bar of California records. Judges found that he filed legal actions that were frivolous or in bad faith and ordered him to pay fines totaling $13,513.

In addition, the California Supreme Court placed him on probation for a year and suspended him from practice for a month as a result of one of those sanctions and two other instances of misconduct, the state bar said.