Lawyers are hired for many reasons, but each time an attorney is retained, the primary goal of the lawyer is to protect his client and the rights of that client during any legal proceedings. Unfortunately, a bad apple revealed itself by betraying the clients who entrusted her in her role as an attorney. 

Karyn McConnell Hancock, an Ohio lawyer who stole over $600,000 from at least 23 clients, was sentenced today to four years in prison.  This is particularly disturbing since she’s a former council

Karyn McConnell Hancock

member, a bishop’s wife and a judge’s daughter.  She also has a four year old son and has given birth to her second child in the meantime.  Once her lies began unraveling, she devised an elaborate story and became, in her mind, the victim of a kidnapping. 

She claimed she was taken at gunpoint in December, 2007 by two men and a woman and forced to travel from Ohio to Georgia with these phantom kidnappers, only to be released on the roads of Atlanta, GA.  Of course, this was all disproved and she finally came forward and admitted to owing many of her clients hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Her husband has said, in her defense, that she simply became overwhelmed and began to buckle under the pressure. 

That very well might be, but in the process, she managed to destroy the faith her clients had in her, disgraced her husband and father and annihilated a career that she worked so hard for.  Now, it appears she will be missing out on at least a couple years of her children’s lives.  Since 2002, she’d been stealing from one client to replace money stolen from another.  Clearly, that was an exhausting process to maintain for nearly seven years.  It just snowballed from there and finally ended with a nationwide manhunt.  For three days, she allowed her family to believe she’d been kidnapped and left them to believe the worst.  Just as with the financial advisor (read here) earlier this week, the solution these two people thought they’d found only added far more serious consequences to an already desperate situation.  The common denominators in stories like these are the relieved and thankful families who only want to protect them in ways these people wouldn’t - or couldn’t - allow them to do before they made headlines.