Onetime Cobb Lawyer Gets Prison for Stealing From Clients

Staff Report

Cobb District Attorney Vic Reynolds has announced that a local lawyer has pleaded guilty to stealing money from clients.

Romin Vincent Alavi, 38, of Marietta pleaded guilty Wednesday afternoon to three counts of forgery and two counts of theft. The charges stem from two civil cases Alavi was involved in between 2010 and 2012.

In one case, he accepted a settlement in a personal injury case without his clients’ knowledge or permission, then forged the couple’s signatures on the $25,000 settlement check and kept the cash for himself.

In the other case, Alavi took $20,000 from a client in a contractor-dispute case, but never filed a lawsuit and kept that money. He showed his client a purported court order bearing the forged signature of a judge.

Gregory Epstein, the assistant district attorney who prosecuted the case, said Alavi’s clients had trusted him to protect them.

“He treated that trust with about as much consideration as you would a cockroach scuttling across your kitchen floor,” Epstein said in a statement. He also pointed out that “when Dante wrote The Inferno, he did not place murderers, rapists, or child molesters in the lowest circle of hell. He put traitors there.”

Cobb Superior Court Judge Mary E. Staley then sentenced Alavi to 10 years, with two years to serve in custody. He was ordered to pay restitution of $45,000 and he may not seek reinstatement of his law license in Georgia – which he voluntarily surrendered – or seek to practice elsewhere for the duration of his sentence.