There is a nameplate that says it all. Sitting on a desk inside the offices of Litigation Practice Group — a California law firm that collected nearly $300 million in fees from tens of thousands of desperate debt-ridden Americans before collapsing into bankruptcy — was a small placard with four words: "I don't work here."

The person sitting behind that desk was Tony Diab. A twice-disbarred attorney who had been stripped of his law licenses in both Nevada and California for stealing client money, forging a judge's signature, and fabricating a court order. A man legally prohibited from running a law firm, supervising attorneys, managing client funds, or practicing law in any capacity. A man who, according to court filings, was simultaneously the actual operational mind of one of the largest debt-relief law firms in America, collecting more than $15 million a month from clients who believed their fees were being held in trust.

The nameplate was not a joke. It was a strategy.

The First Disbarment: Forged Judges and Stolen Settlements

To understand Tony Diab, you have to start with the acts that cost him his law licenses — because those acts reveal the operational playbook he would later replicate at massive scale.

According to the Nevada Supreme Court's 2019 disbarment order, Diab misdirected a $375,000 client settlement — money owed to a personal injury plaintiff — directly into his own personal bank account. When confronted, he allegedly forged an email from opposing counsel falsely stating that the settlement had been contested, explaining why the money hadn't been disbursed. He presented this fabricated email to cover his tracks.

In a separate matter, Diab forged the signature of a sitting judge on a fraudulent court order and presented it to a client as proof that an active arrest warrant had been cancelled. The warrant was still very much active. The client, relying on Diab's document, acted accordingly — and faced the real-world consequences.

The Nevada Supreme Court's analysis was blunt: the baseline sanction for Diab's misconduct was disbarment. There was no mitigating path. He had engaged in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, and misrepresentation at a level that fundamentally disqualified him from practicing law. The Nevada disbarment came in January 2019. The California Supreme Court followed in December 2019, relying on the same underlying conduct and the California State Bar's petition for disbarment.

Tony Diab was now prohibited from practicing law anywhere in the United States under his own name. So he found another way.

The Architecture of Invisibility: Litigation Practice Group

According to a detailed complaint filed by bankruptcy trustee Richard A. Marshack — who was appointed by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California to administer LPG's estate — Diab did not simply disappear after his disbarments. He had been running a debt resolution practice even before the disbarments were finalized. After losing his licenses, he moved that practice into an existing law firm called Litigation Practice Group, which he acquired through intermediaries.

To maintain the fiction of legitimate legal operations, Diab needed a licensed attorney to serve as the visible face of the firm. He found one in Daniel Stephen March, a Tustin, California attorney who agreed — allegedly for $600,000 per year — to serve as LPG's nominal managing shareholder. March signed off on the firm in all regulatory and public filings. March's name appeared on letterhead. March's bar license gave LPG the legal standing to represent clients, hold funds in client trust accounts, and practice law.

In reality, according to the trustee's complaint, March did virtually none of these things. Diab controlled everything: the finances, the operations, the client acquisition strategy, the management of attorney employees. Diab impersonated March in communications, signing contracts via DocuSign using March's identity. He required his own employees to refer to him as "Admin" to prevent a paper trail. His desk — at a law firm he supposedly did not work at — bore the now-infamous nameplate: "I don't work here."

Before March, Diab had briefly operated the same structure through another attorney, John Thompson, until Thompson transferred his interest to March.

The Scale: $282 Million In, $4,500 Out

LPG's business model was, on its face, a legitimate one. The firm offered debt validation services to consumers struggling with credit card debt — sending demand letters to creditors and credit agencies, disputing debts, and sometimes filing lawsuits on clients' behalf. Clients would pay monthly fees over 18 to 36 months via ACH withdrawals from their personal bank accounts, in the expectation that their debts would be resolved.

What actually happened to those monthly fees is the heart of the scandal. According to the California State Bar's disciplinary complaint against March, LPG signed up between 40,000 and 60,000 clients and collected between $78 million and $282 million in advance fees. Those fees should have been held in a client trust account — the most basic and inviolable rule of legal ethics — and disbursed to creditors on behalf of clients. Instead, according to the bar complaint, March and Diab transferred enormous amounts out of the trust account and into their own personal accounts.

The bankruptcy trustee's investigation found that when LPG filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on March 20, 2023, its accounts contained exactly $4,500 in cash. The rest of the $282 million had vanished. The 40,000 to 60,000 clients who had paid their monthly fees — often people in genuine financial distress, making sacrifices to pay for debt relief — were left with their original debts unresolved, their money gone, and a bankrupt "law firm" that could no longer even return their calls.

This is Part 1 of The Ethics Reporter's investigative series on Tony Diab. In the articles that follow, we will examine how Diab allegedly turned LPG into a pyramid scheme, how he allegedly transferred client accounts to new firms when the fraud collapsed, and the burning question that thousands of victims are demanding an answer to: why is Tony Diab still not in prison?

This is Part 1 of The Ethics Reporter's multi-part investigative series: "The Ghost in the Law Firm: The Tony Diab Story."