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Office Manager Charged with Embezzling More Than
$850,000 from Chicago Law Firm

A longtime employee and office manager of a Chicago law firm has been charged with pilfering more than $850,000 from the firm over a long-term period, depositing most of the proceeds into a personal bank account and using other portions to pay for meals at a downtown lunch club, according to the office of Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez.

Joan M. Sanchez, 52, of Oak Lawn, has been charged with Felony Theft for allegedly stealing a total of $884,299 from a downtown law firm over the course of a seven year period.  (Class 1 Theft is a non-probationable felony offense punishable by up to 15 years in prison upon conviction.) 

According to court documents, Sanchez has been employed with the law firm of Kelly Olson Michod Dehann & Richter, L.L.C. for 24 years and has served as the firm’s office manager for the last 21 years.  According to prosecutors, the thefts began in October of 2002 and continued through April of 2009.  During that time frame, Sanchez is accused of writing a total of 234 unauthorized checks totaling $884,299 from the firm’s business account without the knowledge or consent of her employers. 

Prosecutors allege that 176 of those checks, totaling $836,500, were written by the defendant, made payable to herself, and then deposited in her personal checking account at a Chicago bank.  The remaining 58 checks, totaling $47,799, were written by the defendant and made payable to a lunch club at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where the defendant often dined with her mother.

In each of the unauthorized checks written by Sanchez, investigators said she would forge the signature of one of the partners in the firm on the check, and then create fake journal entries in the firm’s ledger to make it appear that the checks were written to legitimate vendors and then voided.

The law firm discovered the scheme while Sanchez was on vacation in Hawaii and a $40 reimbursement check drawn from the firm’s bank account bounced, even though the firm’s internal ledger showed that the account contained a significant amount of money.  The firm then contacted police and an investigation was initiated by the Chicago Police and the State’s Attorney’s Financial Crimes Units.

Sanchez was arrested Tuesday and she appeared in bond court today at the Cook County Criminal Courts Building, where Judge Maria Kuriakos-Ciesil set bail at $100,000.   Sanchez will next appear in court on June 8.

State’s Attorney Alvarez thanked the Chicago Police Department’s Financial Crimes Unit for their efforts in the investigation as well as investigators and prosecutors from the Special Prosecutions Bureau, including Assistant State’s Attorney Nick Trutenko, for their handling of the case.  

The public is reminded that criminal charging documents contain allegations that are not evidence of guilt.  The defendant is presumed innocent and is entitled to a fair trial at which the state has the burden of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.