Justice Hammerschlag was still required to decide a separate but related dispute about whether Mr Gordon's companies should be ordered to pay the firm almost $1 million in unpaid fees. The settlement of the fraud case was only reached after a 13-day trial involving 30 volumes of documents running to over 10,000 pages. At that stage, Justice Hammerschlag had written but not yet delivered a 113-page judgment. "The work needed to recast the judgment has been considerable", he said. Justice Hammerschlag said that to determine the fee dispute he needed to consider a range of matters "extending well beyond the direct confines of the fee dispute", including the frauds committed by Clarke, his position at Atanaskovic Hartnell, and how John Atanaskovic, one of the firm's principals, "saw and treated him". Clarke "was a solicitor of this court. He is a fraudster and a thief. He is in prison," Justice Hammerschlag said in a damning judgment. His "villainy was exposed" on September 28, 2017.

The young lawyer started working at Atanaskovic Hartnell in December 2013 after stints as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs and a solicitor at law firm Ashurst. The frauds, which fed a gambling addiction, started in mid-2016. Clarke was earning a "large" salary "almost on par with some AH partners", Justice Hammerschlag said. He was charged out at $575 an hour, compared with $325 for junior lawyers. A senior solicitor who was shortly to become a partner was charging $600 and "at least one partner" was charging $675. "My impression was that he was treated by some as the young 'hot shot,'" Justice Hammerschlag said. He said that a "recurrent but unconvincing, and in my view contrived, theme of [Mr] Atanaskovic’s evidence ... was that Clarke was a junior, mediocre, employed lawyer with no future at AH, who played no meaningful role in any matter on which he was engaged".

"In one instance Clarke was said to be no more than a 'note taker', in another his function was described as 'post-box'," he said. Justice Hammerschlag said there was "nothing which suggests that the work Clarke did, including on significant conveyancing transactions, was in any way inadequate or incompetent". "As the frauds he perpetrated demonstrate, he was astute as a dishonest lawyer," he said. He said Mr Atanaskovic "took issue with the suggestion that he saw Clarke as a young 'hot shot' because he saw him as of only modest legal talent, he did not receive any increase in remuneration while at AH and was not considered for partnership". "I think Atanaskovic thought better of Clarke than he now says," Justice Hammerschlag said.

He said it was "evident that Mr Atanaskovic had an acute awareness that Clarke’s role and position were critical matters in the assessment of whether Clarke’s employment provided the opportunity and was the occasion for his frauds". Loading It was "somewhat difficult to see how it could be said that Clarke’s employment did not give him the opportunity for and was not the occasion for the frauds", he said. But in a win for Atanaskovic Hartnell, Justice Hammerschlag resolved the fee dispute by ordering that WIN and Birketu pay the firm $928,982, which was close to the full amount claimed. He subtracted a sum the firm had claimed for investigating Clarke's fraudulent conduct involving Deutsche Bank, which released almost $7 million to Clarke after he impersonated Mr Gordon's son Andrew.