Levine Staller Michael Sklar Arthur Sklar UNSCRUPULOUS LAWYERS THAT FORGED LEGAL TRUST DOCUMENTS AND DEMANDED DEFENDANT TO SIGN IN MULTIPLE MOTIONS Atlantic City, New Jersey

Michael Sklar tax appeals attorney,

http://www.mcall.com/business/mc-mount-airy-casino-drunk-20170201-story.html

It's the kind of state regulation that many people aren't aware of largely because it's rarely enforced, but Pennsylvania's casinos are not permitted to serve alcohol to visibly intoxicated gamblers.

It's one that Mount Airy Casino apparently violated 18 times in one day. The Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board Wednesday fined Mount Airy $25,000 for an Oct. 7 incident in which three bartenders served 27 drinks in nine hours to a man who was playing a table top slot machine in its Glass Bar, including 18 drinks after the man was visibly drunk. The man, whom the casino did not identify, ended up falling off his bar stool and resisting arrest by state police.

It's only the third time in 11 years in which a casino has been fined for serving a drunk gambler. This one had casino officials and gaming board members puzzled.

"Let me say from the outset that this is unacceptable," said Mount Airy attorney Michael Sklar. "Mount Airy takes this very seriously."

"I'm glad you understand the seriousness of this," said gaming board member Greg Fajt, during the gaming board meeting in Harrisburg. "This is pretty outrageous."

"Count me naive, but I don't understand how anyone who had 27 drinks wasn't in the emergency room," said Board Chairman David Barash. "I don't understand how he wasn't in a coma. What in the world were bartenders No. 2 and No. 3 thinking?"

"It's inexplicable what the bartenders did here," Sklar said. "There's no excuse."

According to the consent decree signed by Mount Airy, the man began playing and drinking shortly after 1 p.m., and was served 27 rums and cokes – each 1.25 ounces of rum – until he fell off his bar stool 10:41 p.m.

       MOB GUYS

Mount Airy has a policy of escalating discipline for employee infractions, but Sklar said all three bartenders were fired.

"Given the nature of this incident," Sklar said, "there was no progressive discipline."

Sklar said casino security attempted to put the man in an ambulance after his fall, but he was instead taken to Monroe County Prison after he resisted and state police had to be called.

The casino retrained its bar staff and tightened its policies as part of the consent decree.

Michael Sklar stars as a sexually ambiguous rich, and stingy American, abroad and Max Delys as his pretty Parisian boy!

Why does it keep attaching to my searches???

SKLAR sues Atlantic City for taxes, sinks the city from tax burdens and now blocks 3 Casinos from staying open? 3030 Atlantic Ave. is fielding questions on the subject.

Dec 11 (Reuters) - Tax collectors in Atlantic City, New Jersey, garnered bids for less than half of the tax liens on bankruptcasinos they had hoped to auction on Thursday, another blow to the city's already weak coffers.

While a buyer snapped up about $22 million of tax debt associated with the Trump Taj Mahal and Trump Plaza casinos , nobody bid on the lien for $32 million in unpaid taxes owed by the Revel Casino Hotel.

The sale of the Trump liens, at least, gives Atlantic City an immediate cash infusion. Officials are also planning a $40 million note sale before the end of the calendar year, though that is only about a third of what the city previously hoped to borrow in the capital markets.

Those two revenue sources combined mean the city "has no issues regarding continuing operations," said city Revenue Director Michael Stinson.

Four of Atlantic City's 12 casinos have closed this year. Another - the Trump Taj Mahal, already in bankruptcy - is slated to close this month. The closures have gutted the city's tax base and eliminated nearly 10,000 jobs.

Atlantic City collects about $377 million in tax revenue annually, which includes collections on behalf of local schools and county government, Stinson said.

At least 29 U.S. states allow municipalities to sell tax liens, according to the National Tax Lien Association, which says that cities and counties fail to collect about $14 billion of property taxes across the country.

The casino liens sold on Thursday were for far larger amounts than the rest of the 1,100 tax debts auctioned by the city.

"These are very big tax liens," said David Bullock, managing director at Arque Advisors, whose firm has bought tax liens in the past. "And the collateral is the casinos, and who knows whether you can use them and re-deploy them for some other purpose."

The winning bidder pays the taxes, gaining the right to foreclose later if the property owner does not repay with interest, which in New Jersey can be as high as 18 percent.

Michael Sklar, an attorney with Levine Staller, was the only bidder on the Trump liens. The firm has represented the Trump casinos in the past but is in a legal dispute with the company over unpaid fees.

Sklar's bid was for zero percent. He declined to say if he was buying on behalf of a client. (Reporting by Daniel Kelley in Atlantic City; Additional reporting by Hilary Russ in New York; Editing by Dan Grebler)

Policing gamblers who can't police themselves isn't easy ...

These guys sued Atlantic City for back taxes for Trump!!! Trump took the dough and bankrupted his Casinos!  Now they owe over 20 mil and wont pay AC!!!!!

Another Atlantic City CasinoLawyer ruining it for everyone!!!!

Like a sick person, a company facing litigation is willing to spend big bucks to get out of a trouble.

Lawyers are only too happy to oblige, billing clients for every minute worked, and then some.

But is it possible to get sound counsel from someone who just pulled 52 all-nighters in a row? How about paying more than $1,000 for an hour of legal advice? And what about being charged for 26 hours in a single day?

Like all consultants, some lawyers find questionable ways to squeeze money out of clients. Some are legal, some aren't, but all will make a CFO's blood boil.

So review those invoices, make sure you know billing rates, and kindly remind Dewy, Cheatem and How LLP, that summer associates don't need to stay in VIP suites at the Four Seasons.

To remind you of the dangers, we've updated an article from our archives by Lawrence Delevingne and Gus Lubin. Here's what to watch for:

Double billing

Billing two clients for the same hour of work is dubious legally and ethically. That doesn't mean it's uncommon.

More than one-third of American lawyers admitted to occasionally double-billing clients in a 2007 survey from Samford University's Cumerland Law School. According to the study, the percentage of attorneys who believed that the practice was unethical fell from 64.7 percent in 1995-96 to only 51.8 percent in 2006-07, even though the practice has been condemned by the American Bar Association and most legal commentators.

One egregious example is of a Long Island lawyer whose claims in government legal bills included working more than 1,200 days in a year and claiming to be a full-time employee of five different school districts, according to the ABA Journal.

Padding hours

Padding hours is a basic building block of consulting billing excess.

Work for ninety minutes? Call it two hours. Forget how long you worked? Call it five. Avery Tolar, Gene Hackman's character in The Firm, sure made it work.

According to the Samford study, "a distressingly high percentage of attorneys believe that time-based billing results in bill padding and provides incentives for attorneys to perform unnecessary work." Two-thirds of the respondents stated that they had specific knowledge of bill padding.

For example, an extensive Illinois hearing board investigation into the billing records of a lawyer at Mayer Brown found that he billed more than 150 hours during a two-week period in which he actually worked less than 50.

The lawyer's routine was to arrive at the office around noon, stay until the other lawyers went home around 5, and then go home himself soon after — while claiming to stay at the office until late in the night. When he was in the office, investigators found, the lawyer made edits to documents at a rate somewhere in the range of one edit per hour.

That's the more common version of over-billing, as opposed to the notorious 1990s example of an energetic Cravath attorney who billed 26 hours in a day, according to the Washington Monthly.

Overhead

Are you paying for your lawyer's air conditioning? Michael Vick was.

Faced with a $2.66 million fee for a bankruptcy case, Vick learned that his lawyers were charging for extensive overhead expenses. As Am Law Daily noted, these included the cost of running air conditioning during the weekend; taxi rides home for employees working late; and $1,200 for plane tickets from New York to Kansas.

Cromwell & Moring also billed the quarterback for an incredible number of hours — 7,200 billable hours of work over ten months, equivalent to working 24 hours a day on the Vick case for 300 straight days.

Vick's fee was subsequently reduced by a disapproving judge to $1.5 million.

Trivial tasks

Sometimes, law firms use high billing rates to stick clients with unnecessarily expensive bills for research, secretarial work, and other low-level tasks.

For example, a federal judge scolded Richards Kibbe & Orbe after a firm lawyer billed $325 an hour to review an estate landscaping plan and used a $190-an-hour paralegal to deliver a letter to court, according to the Bergen Record. Why not just use FedEx? the judge asked.

Expense accounts

Expense reports can be great opportunities to practice greed — er, billing creativity. You might claim reimbursement for the cost of first-class tickets when actually you flew coach. Or you could claim reimbursement for plane tickets, hotels, and meals when actually you didn't travel at all.

For example, a lawyer at Sullivan & Cromwell used these techniques and others to misappropriate over $500,000 before being disbarred in 2008, according to the Wall Street Journal. Besides outright false expenses, the lawyer admitted to improperly billing for personal "meals, travel and lodging" and first-class tickets on international flights, for which he paid for coach or business-class tickets, pocketing the difference.

Also in 2008, a lawyer at Latham & Watkins pleaded guilty to one count of mail fraud for mischaracterizing more than $200,000 of expenses as reimbursable.

Exorbitant rates

Although fair by the virtues of the free market, there is something wrong about four-figure hourly rates.

According to last year's billing survey by The National Law Journal, the highest billing rate belonged to a partner at Locke Lord's Dallas office at $1,285 an hour.

Meanwhile the highest associate billing rate was $760 an hour at DLA Piper's New York office.

That counsel betterbe good.

Inefficiency

High legal fees often seem like a rip-off, and once in a while, a judge agrees.

In one case of indisputable inefficiency, attorneys tasked with the recovery of billions of dollars lost in the R. Allen Stanford Ponzi scheme recovered only $81 million. According to the AP, the attorneys charged $27 million for three months of shoddy work.

In other words, an unprecedented 34% of the recovered sum would be paid to legal fees. The situation was improved somewhat by a judge, who rejected and withheld about $7 million in fees.

Negligence

Anytime you pay an upfront fee, you risk the lawyer not doing much or any work.

This was a growing problem in the past year with a high number of foreclosure cases, which often involve initial payments. In a typical case last month, Gladis Heras paid a lawyer to arrange a modification of her mortgage. Months later, her bank had not been contacted about the mortgage, and the lawyer had done his best to disappear, according to the Daily Business Review.

Thankfully, he was arrested after receiving dozens of complaints related to negligence and abandonment.

Training

Sometimes, law firms charge clients for developing talent.

Recently, Tuckerbrook Alternative Investments sued Bingham McCutchen, claiming the firm stacked a case with young associates who had “inadequate” experience. “The billing statements reflect that these junior lawyers in essence were enjoying the benefits of on-the-job-training at Tuckerbrook’s expense,” the complaint states, according to Above the Law.

Working while sleeping

Even if clients believe the super-human hours lawyers sometimes bill, it's hard to believe any counsel coming from someone who hasn't slept in days is worth much.

One extreme (if-dated) example was a partner at Chicago's Chapman & Cutler, James Spiotto, who charged clients for more than 5,471 hours in a single year – about 15 hours a day, every day.

Called "possibly the hardest-working lawyer in America" by his colleagues, Spiotto claimed to have pulled 52 all-nighters in a row in 1993, working on bankruptcy matters, according to the Washington Post.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/10-ways-lawyers-rip-off-clients-2013-7#ixzz3JToTErmu

Levine Staller and Archer and Greiner coerced and sent a lawyers fees bill up to Trenton for over 63k in Archer and Greiner's name to the judgements department and unethically let the Law Firm of Archer and Greiner from Haddnfield NJ to assume Sklar's debt. I wonder how many more lives have William Thompson and Drew Burach from Haddonfield NJ have ruined?

Bill Thompson and Drew Burach are the lawyers from Archer and Greiner who allowed  Arthur Sklar to run a lawbill of 260k versus a bankrupt ex-husband of Sklar's daughter. They sued the husband for two million dollars and he was only worth 17k at the time of separation. FRAUD WAS NEVER PROVEN! HOMETOWNED ANOTHER ONE ARCHER AND GRIENER FAMILY DEPARTMENT!

MULTIPLE ETHICS VIOLATIONS, CHANGING LEGAL DOCUMENTS, ABUSE OF THE COURTS, BULLYING ARTHUR SKLAR MICHAEL SKLAR These BULLY LAWYERS sent multiple emails and mail correspondences, pressuring my lawyer and myself to sign a document that only had changes on the FIRST PAGE. In response to these shifty, underhanded attempts to coerse my former attorney, and myself into signing a trust document(that I was directing) that was ONLY to have CHANGES on the FIRST page. The Sklar's reputation for altering documents is true. The changes were made to the above mentioned "Trust Agreement" on page THREE are so unethical and incomprehensible! Changes to #5 and page 3 (The Xxxx Life Insurance Trust) from xxx and xxx as Successor Trustee's to Leslie Sklar and Micheal Sklar as successor trustees. After multiple correspondents to me over-emphasizing and even highlighting the ONLY CHANGES to the trust on PAGE ONE. This shows exactly how unethical these lawyers and lawfirm are. I KNOW THAT THIS HAS BEEN ALLEGED AGAINST SKLAR IN THE PAST! I am includED the Levin Staller Partners because they are involved and should know. It is thier letterhead he uses to bully, lie, commit multiple ethics violations, abuse of the courts, running up over 500k in legal fees, from the false accusation of fraud!!! Michael Sklar is directly involved with these allegations, he lied under oath in court, as a false witness and is involved in the LIFE INSURANCE TRUST COERSION.