Theft trial begins for former Downingtown attorney

WEST CHESTER » Is an lawyer like a house painter?

That’s among the questions that may be posed to the jury selected to hear the case of suspended attorney Joshua Janis, who will appear in Common Pleas Court Monday for the start of his scheduled three- week long trial involving allegations of theft of fees from more than 20 former clients.

Judge Patrick Carmody is set to oversee jury selection in the Justice Center’s Courtroom One for the trials that has been delayed for several months, mostly because of COVID- 19 restrictions involving the list of witnesses the prosecution intends ro call, some of whom will arrive from out- ofstate and must meet quarantine regulations.

Janis was arrested and charged in 2018 with a litany of counts, most of which accuse him of taking money from a series of people anting his legal services and then doing little, or no, work for them on what might have been relatively uncomplicated cases such as an uncontested divorce or simple custody matter.

He is also accused of stealing money from his former law firm by taking fees that clients paid which were supposed to be given to the firm’s general account but that he illegally kept for himself.

The charges include theft by failure to make required disposition of funds, theft by deception and forgery.

But Janis’s attorney, Ryan Hyde of Exton, has argued that what the attorney did was similar to a labor contract which left the client unhappy.

“A better analogy,” Hyde wrote in a motion seeking to have charges against Janis dismissed before trial, “would be a painter hired to paint a room, the client chooses the color, but when the paint dries the color is not what they wanted.

“Here, many of the clients got work done for them but were unhappy with the results,” Hyde wrote. “In this case, Janis made representations that

the would do his best to produce an outcome” but the client’s dissatisfaction with the outcome does not represent theft.

Carmody rejected that argument in pre- trial proceedings, but said it would be up to a jury to decide if what Janis did met the elements of the theft statutes.

Janis “promised a certain level of expertise and/ or results in order to get clients to give him money,” the judge wrote in his decision denying Hyde’s motion

to dismiss. “The Commonwealth alleges that he repeatedly failed to do what was required of him. In some cases, he did nothing at all.”

Janis, 40, who formerly lived in East Caln but who now resides in West Milford, N. J., came under scrutiny by Chester County Detectives since shortly after he was suspended by the state Supreme Court in December 2015, in some cases for the same conduct now charged criminally — that is, taking money for legal representation and avoiding doing as he had been hired to do.

A complaint filed against Janis by Chester County Detective Gerald Davis states the total amount of money that Janis is alleged to have stolen from the more than two dozen clients is $ 93,241.

Janis, a graduate of Widener

University School of Law, worked for the Ciccarelli Law Firm in West Chester from 206 to 2013, where he handled mostly domestic relations and personal injury cases. From 2013 to 2015, he worked for his own law firm, which had offices in Downingtown, West Chester and Malvern.

In his private practice, handling family court matters, civil disputes, and minor criminal cases county detectives uncovered a allegedly simple, but ultimately unexplainable, pattern. Janis would be retained by a client to do work. The client would give him money for the case. But instead of depositing the client’s money into a trust account required for client’s money, Janis would deposit the money into his own account or otherwise take the money.

Then he would do no work, or very little, on the case, even though the matters were sometimes legally very simple and straightforward,

all the while assuring the client that he was handling the matter. When the client discovered the problem, the client would have to hire another lawyer to address the problem, represent him or herself, or the problem remained unresolved.

On of the cases involves a woman named Bonnie Kennedy, who hired Janis to represent her in a custody case involving her sons in September 2014. He took $ 2,500 from her, which she managed by depleting a retirement account, yet never filed any paperwork in the custody case, taking the money and using it to pay for a family vacation, she said. Eventually, she sued him and won a $ 2,500 award, but has never received anything from that verdict.

Kennedy, who lives in Elverson, said Janis’s failure to properly represent her had had an impact on her life far more than a lost dollar amount. The failure to

be able to adequately represent herself in the custody proceedings drove a wedge between her and her younger son, now a teenager.

“The most important part of their lives,” was lost to her because of Janis’ conduct, she said in an interview in 2018 after his arrest.

Janis also faces charges involving his ex- wife and mother in law, who have accused him of stealing from them by opening credit card accounts in their names without their knowledge, and running up bills in the thousands of dollars on those accounts. Those charges are being tried separately.

The prosecution team handling the case includes former Chief Deputy District Attorney Ronald Yen and Assistant District Attorney John McCaul.