EVANSVILLE, Indiana — A disbarred Indiana lawyer has been arrested again, this time accused of collecting fees from a client and pretending to do legal work he had no right to perform, the ABA Journal reported on October 27, citing coverage by WFIE (14 News) in Evansville.
Source: ABA Journal
Jared Thomas, 41, of Evansville, was booked into the Vanderburgh County Jail on October 25, according to the ABA Journal, which published his booking photo from the Vanderburgh County Sheriff's Office. He has been charged with forgery, fraud and practice of law by a nonlawyer.
Police questioned Thomas about allegedly taking $950 from a client who hired him to expunge her criminal record, and about lying when he said the paperwork had been filed, the ABA Journal reported. Expungement is the court process that seals or clears an old criminal record, and clients who pay for it often have no easy way to check whether a filing ever reached the court.
Thomas has offered an explanation, and it is reported here as his claim, not as an established fact: according to WFIE coverage cited by the ABA Journal, he claimed that a paralegal with access to his computers had been filing the fake documents. The reporting does not say that police have confirmed that account, and no other person has been reported charged in connection with the new case.
What the new charges allege
The new charges are allegations only. Thomas is presumed innocent of them unless and until the state proves them in court. What prosecutors must show, on the reporting available, is a pattern the state says it has seen from him before: money taken for legal work, documents that were not what they appeared to be, and a client left believing a case was moving when it was not.
A disbarment built on a forged judge's signature
The background to this arrest is a matter of court record. In a per curiam opinion decided on April 21, 2022, the Indiana Supreme Court disbarred Thomas permanently, finding that he had criminally mismanaged his trust account, forged a judge's signature and falsified at least one document. Thomas had been admitted to the Indiana bar in 2011.
Source: Indiana Supreme Court, In the Matter of Jared Michel Thomas (Apr. 21, 2022), via Justia
The court described a check-kiting scheme over roughly three weeks in early 2020, in which Thomas wrote checks between his trust account and his operating account until the trust account was overdrawn. A $6,000 equalization payment owed to a client in a marital dissolution case was then deposited into that overdrawn account. The $6,000 had still not been paid to the client when the account was closed; instead, the court said, it reduced the loss the bank wrote off.
In a separate matter under investigation by the Indiana Supreme Court Disciplinary Commission, Thomas admitted that he had fraudulently created a document that purported to be a court order granting a sentence modification to a client, and that he forged the presiding judge's signature on it. The justices wrote that his admitted acts demonstrated unfitness to practice law and that permanent disbarment was warranted.
Thomas was already under an interim suspension when he was disbarred, arising from a September 2021 conviction for check deception. The ABA Journal reported that he was arrested in 2021 on a check deception charge and sentenced to probation, and the Supreme Court noted that he also had prior discipline, citing a 2018 published order in his case.
A person paying to clear an old record is paying for filings inside a court system they usually cannot see. If no filing is made, the client may learn the truth only months later, when a job or licence check still shows the record. Before paying any lawyer, readers can check that the lawyer is currently licensed and in good standing on their state bar's official roll, and can ask for the court's stamped copy of every filing.
What happens next
The new case will now move through the courts in Vanderburgh County. Neither the ABA Journal nor the WFIE coverage it cited published a next hearing date or the penalties Thomas could face if convicted on the new counts, and Awaaz Punjab is not estimating either. What is already settled is his status as a lawyer: the 2022 disbarment was permanent, so any legal work he performed for the client in this case would, if proved, have been work he had no licence to do at all.
For Punjabi and other immigrant readers in Indiana, the practical lesson of the case is a verification habit, not a headline. Immigration, family and record-clearing matters all run on filed documents with case numbers. A real filing can always be confirmed directly with the court clerk or the state bar, independently of the person who was paid to file it.