License revoked for lawyer with lunchbox full of cash

A three-judge panel has revoked the law license of a former associate at Stallings & Bischoff PC who showed up with a Tidewater Tides lunchbox filled with $30,000 in cash and uncashed checks after the firm discovered he was not following its procedures for court-appointed work.

Edward Ruffin House worked in the Suffolk office of the firm, and a firm member learned that checks from the Supreme Court of Virginia were being sent in House’s name to that office rather than to the firm’s primary office in Virginia Beach with the firm as payee.

When Moody E. Stallings Jr., a principal in the firm, confronted him about the failure to follow firm procedures, House handed him the lunchbox, according to testimony Wednesday at the hearing presided over by Virginia Beach Circuit Judge H. Thomas Padrick.

House, 36, admitted the firm was due about $60,000 for court-appointed work that he had performed but for which he had not yet submitted vouchers.

House also acknowledged he had spent about $5,000 in cash that retained clients had given him and that the $11,000 in cash was from retained clients.

After he was fired in January, House sent a handwritten note to Stallings and a personal check for $20,000 that he said was more than he had taken from the firm. He expressed the hope that Stallings would forgive him and “not involve any other parties,” according to Virginia State Bar documents in the case.

That was an apparent reference to concern about criminal charges.

According to The Suffolk News-Herald, Stallings testified, “I wished him luck. I knew he was going to have problems with the bar, and I kind of hoped he wasn’t going to have problems with Mr. Ferguson,” a reference to Suffolk Commonwealth’s Attorney C. Phillips Ferguson.

Stallings said legal ethics required him to report the apparent embezzlement to the Virginia State Bar but not to law enforcement authorities. No criminal charges have been filed.

House has cooperated with the firm and with the VSB since the confrontation with Stallings, including filling out the paperwork to ensure that the firm would be paid the $60,000 in vouchers that had not been submitted.

A graduate of the University of Virginia, House worked as a golf pro before enrolling at the Regent University law school and passing the bar exam in 2004. He joined Stallings & Bischoff in July 2007 and followed the firm’s procedures until October 2009, when he started listing himself as payee on the court-appointed vouchers, according to VSB documents.

According to the News-Herald, he testified Wednesday that his termination from the firm “was undoubtedly one of the worst days of my life. I just really came to grips with the fact that I’d done wrong. I was sorry, because it dawned on me finally that what I was doing was wrong. I kept saying to myself, ‘Why would you do that?’”