Practicing law for one of the city’s top insurance litigation firms, Brian Valery did quite well for himself. He pulled in $155,000 a year. He won at least one multimillion-dollar product liability case.
But yesterday, he stood before a judge in Manhattan, and admitted that his two years of lawyering at Anderson, Kill & Olick were an elaborate masquerade – that he had never passed the bar, never gone to law school and, in fact, never even earned an undergraduate degree.
“It’s over,” he grumbled as he left Manhattan Supreme Court with the promise of a no-jail, five-year probation deal when he’s sentenced in three months for stealing $225,000, the amount he’d been overpaid in salary based on his lies.
He then left the building, running from news photographers as fast as his dress shoes could carry him, with his charcoal, pinstriped jacket bunched under one arm.
Valery represented some 50 clients over the course of his two-year scam, which began when he was just a $21,000 a year paralegal. First, he told his bosses that he was going to Fordham Law School. They generously adjusted his schedule to accommodate his “night classes.”
By the time he told them he’d graduated – in May 2002, some four years later – he was a $70,000-a-year law clerk.
He was promoted to the legal staff, and began practicing law.
Bizarrely, he twice told his bosses he’d flunked the bar, only to give them the good news of his “passing’ in 2003.
Valery – who did not represent himself – must also serve 100 hours of community service.