Who a lawyer actually represents is one of the most important facts to clear up for anyone hoping to avoid serious professional responsibility problems. It’s usually pretty straightforward, but when it’s at all muddy, the whole representation becomes an ethics CLE slide waiting to happen.
Larry Parres led the bankruptcy practice at Lewis Rice LLC. That we’re writing in the past tense is a bit of a spoiler for where this story is going. Parres worked on the Chapter 11 of DCA Outdoor, Inc., a Kansas City-based collection of roughly 20 nursery, tree farm, and garden retail entities that filed in February 2025 owing Frontier Farm Credit around $95 million. Every entity was owned and controlled by founder Tory Schwope and none of them had any independent directors.
According to an adversary complaint the Official Committee of Unsecured Creditors filed in May, Lewis Rice spent the next seven months representing Schwope rather than the estates that the firm technically represented. That case was just voluntarily dismissed without prejudice on August 20 and Parres is suddenly no longer at Lewis Rice. Perform whatever math you need on that one.
The complaint cites Parres’s own emails, running through the bankruptcy from even before filing, when Frontier conditioned debtor-in-possession financing on installing a chief restructuring officer:
DEAL BREAKER—WE ARE NOT GOING TO PUT A CRO IN PLACE—NOT HAPPENING SO REMOVE IT COMPLETELY.
A CRO is the mechanism by which a lender keeps financing a borrower it no longer trusts to run itself. Opposing one on behalf of the estate is a defensible litigation position — CROs are expensive, and sometimes the incumbent management genuinely is the cheapest competent option. That didn’t seem to be the firm’s motivation here, because the court appointed a CRO anyway. The next day, according to the complaint, Parres emailed his colleagues to tell them that “Tory remains our client so please make sure he agrees with all Juanita decisions before we act” — Juanita being Juanita Schwartzkopf, the court-appointed CRO whose entire function was to make decisions that didn’t route through Schwope.
The complaint claims Parres bcc’d Schwope on this email.
Schwope allegedly wrote back: “Thanks, pal.” Parres, per the complaint, responded that he had Schwope’s back, that Lewis Rice would “continue to bust our ass for you.”
“For you” is sort of the whole sticking point.
The Committee claims that 64.2 percent of Lewis Rice’s billed time went to matters primarily benefiting Schwope as opposed to the various estates paying Lewis Rice for representation — specifically, the Committee alleges that Lewis Rice acted to aid Schwope in a plan to buy back the estates at a discount after shedding debt. Only about 3.4 percent went to anything resembling maximizing estate value. Of that, asset disposition — the mechanism by which the estates would generate recovery for creditors — got less than one hour across the entire engagement.
In March 2025, per the filing, Parres congratulated his team: “Great work guys and know you client appreciates your efforts not to mention Lewis rice appreciates the revenues.”
Parres’s Lewis Rice bio still comes up in preview when you Google him, but heading to the website delivers a “Page Not Found.” The firm informed the St. Louis Business Journal last week that Parres is “no longer a member.”
Last year, Winston & Strawn faced similar allegations. When long-time clients go bankrupt, one would think that might trigger heightened guardrails given how easy it will be for the creditors to point the finger if anything looks fishy.
On the other hand… firms appreciate the revenues.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.
The post Bankruptcy Lawyer Out After Firm Accused Of Working For The Wrong Client appeared first on Above the Law.
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