A former structured finance partner at Dewey & LeBoeuf said he left the firm in late 2010 with a group of other attorneys because he was not paid what he was promised and only learned of Dewey's 2010 debt offering to investors through a client, the New York Law Journal reported yesterday. "At that point, I realized the firm was in significant financial distress and it was not a place where I wanted to have my practice," said Howard Schickler, testifying on Tuesday in the criminal trial against Dewey's former chair Steven Davis, former chief financial officer Joel Sanders and former executive director Stephen DiCarmine. Schickler, who said he has advised on many private placements himself, said that he believed the firm was in distress because if Dewey could not pay its own partners, it was difficult to see how it could pay back investors from the private placement. The Manhattan District Attorney's Office has accused the defendants of defrauding and stealing from the firm's lenders, investors and others through a series of fraudulent accounting entries to hide Dewey's true financial conditions.
