Westside lawyer who represented hundreds of inmates hit with new state bar charges
Aaron Spolin, a Princeton-educated attorney and former McKinsey consultant who signed up thousands of inmate clients seeking release under new criminal justice reform laws, was hit with a second round of charges by the State Bar of California last week.
The 18 counts filed Thursday follow an initial filing of disciplinary charges in August and provide more examples of how the bar contends that Spolin and his Westside firm used deceptive marketing and outright lies to convince desperate families to hire him.
One alleged violation concerned a 2023 press release on Spolin’s website announcing that Gov. Gavin Newsom had commuted the sentence of one of his clients. In fact, the man told The Times last year, he had pursued the commutation on his own, and Spolin did not do any work on it. At the time, Spolin’s firm was urging families to pay more than $9,000 to pursue a commutation, a route experts say has only a miniscule chance of success.
In another instance cited by the bar, an attorney working for Spolin told a Los Angeles man, Wesner Charles Jr., who was serving a sentence of 27 years to life for attempted carjacking and robbery, that a reform law could “get him out” in six to eight months.
A Times investigation found that Aaron Spolin built a booming enterprise by fanning false hopes in some families desperate to get their loved ones home.
Spolin charged the family $19,000 without informing them that Charles and others convicted of violent crimes did not meet the requirements for consideration. The L.A. County district attorney’s office had written “no fewer than nine letters” to Spolin advising him that such cases “would not be acted upon,” wrote Cindy Chan, a supervising attorney in the bar’s Office of Chief Trial Counsel.
Charles, who maintained his innocence, was later released with the help of a different attorney.
The rest of the new allegations relate to three other incarcerated men from L.A. whose families paid between $11,500 and $21,700 for fruitless legal services.
If found culpable, Spolin, 39, faces possible penalties ranging from probation to disbarment by the state Supreme Court.
An attorney for Spolin, Erin Joyce, previously told The Times that her client “has been fully cooperative with the State Bar and will continue to cooperate. He looks forward to resolving this matter in the near future.”
In a filing last month, Joyce wrote that bar prosecutors had informed her that “they intend to serially prosecute [Spolin], bringing multiple cases in succession.” She acknowledged an ongoing criminal investigation by the state attorney general into Spolin’s practices, but denied that he had committed any crimes.
If found culpable, he faces possible penalties ranging from probation to disbarment by the state Supreme Court.
She wrote that “for well over a year,” Spolin “has refused paid representation” for the type of resentencing cases the bar has faulted him for and that “he has also modified or removed his firm’s advertising statements …”
Spolin worked for the Bronx district attorney’s office before moving to L.A. and launching a practice focused on representing inmates under a raft of laws meant to reduce mass incarceration.
He told The Times last year that he used techniques he had learned as a McKinsey consultant to streamline his business. He ran his firm out of a coworking space, used templates for legal documents and paid lawyers from the Philippines and other parts of the developing world hourly rates of about $10.
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