The Priceless Heart Whats A Girl Essay

Submitted By daguyjunior
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The Priceless Heart: What’s a girl to do?

The Law Offices of Mark Doe is a Professional Limited Liability Company based out of New York City that practices Personal Injury Matters. Mark Doe obtained his license six years ago and opened up his own firm the following year. His small firm consists of two employees not including him. He hired Alicia Lilly as his Paralegal a month after he started up his firm. Mark’s longtime friend Sherri Kelsman handles his bookkeeping and has a minimal schedule of one day a week. Since Mark’s firm is a personal injury firm it is contingency-based, which means that Mark earns his profits by settling cases.

One afternoon, Alicia was asked by Mark to check on a settlement check issued to a client only because Sherri would not be in the office that week. Upon Alicia’s research she came across some discrepancies in the firm’s General account. Check logs showed payments to “Cash”, which she clearly knew was unacceptable for a firm to do. She then checked the firms Trustee account, which in turn had debits equaling the same transaction amounts from the General Account. Before bringing it up to Mark, Alicia decided to check the files for all the clients the firm had recently settled. Once she totaled up their settlements, Alicia realized the Trustee account did not balance.

A couple days went by and Alicia could not get the discrepancies she found out of her mind. Monday morning when Sherri was in the office Alicia decided to disclose the information to her, to get an opinion on how she should handle the situation. Alicia also felt it was her duty to let Sherri know so she would not be shocked if and when the firm gets caught with a possible audit by the Statewide Grievance Committee. Unbeknownst to Alicia, it turns out that Sherri knew of Mark’s wrong doings the whole time and has been helping Mark. Sherri told Alicia, “I can’t tell you everything, but Mark is a good man and will pay back all the accounts he borrowed from. I’ve known him for years; we can trust him with this situation. You don’t have to worry about getting caught. Just think about the bigger picture, we’re saving a life”. Alicia was completely shocked by Sherri’s comment and more so with her comment stating, “We’re saving a life”. At this point Alicia was completely lost on what has been going on underneath her nose and really wanted to find out from Mark what was behind his wrongdoings and Sherri’s comment.

After Sherri’s conversation with Alicia, she took it upon herself to alert Mark and let him know Alicia was on to what they were doing. The following morning, Mark calls Alicia into his office and tells her Sherri made him aware of their

conversation. Alicia tells him, “I’m not sure what’s going on here, but clearly things are not being handled appropriately. Sherri told me to look at it as we’re