Elizabeth Holmes appears to be in a major hole that just keeps getting deeper.

Holmes is the founder of Theranos, privately-owned health technology that made her one of the world's youngest self-made female billionaires.

Holmes is a graduate of the St. John's School in Houston. Her father, Christian Holmes IV, worked for Enron, as well as prominent government jobs around Washington D.C.

However, she's spent the last few years dealing with an array of legal problems.

In 2016, she was named in a class-action lawsuit that alleged that Theranos and Walgreens provided customers access to blood-testing machines that ultimately produced a number of inaccurate results.

Now, Holmes is running into significant problems with the lawyers she hired to defend her in that class-action lawsuit.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Alleged billionaire fraudster Elizabeth Holmes has Houston ties. These are the city's biggest scams

Three Cooley LLP lawyers representing the Theranos founder in that lawsuit are requesting to be taken off her case.

Court documents filed Sept. 30 claim that Holmes hasn't paid them in more than a year, according to a report from the The Washington Post.

In 2003, at the age of 19, Holmes dropped out of Stanford University to create the company that would make her wildly rich and successful.

She started raising millions of dollars from powerful donors, such as former Secretaries of State Howard Schulz and Henry Kissinger, as well as Silicon Valley giants like media titan Rupert Murdoch, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and several members of the Walton family (which founded Walmart), among others.

In 2015, Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou published an investigative report that would ultimately lead to several investigations of Theranos.

In March of 2018, Holmes and her company were charged with fraud by the SEC.

As a result, she agreed to give up financial and voting control of the company, pay a $500,000 fine, and return 18.9 million in shares of Theranos stock. In addition, the SEC mandated that she will not be allowed to be the director or officer of a publicly traded company for 10 years.

In 2020, Holmes will be tried in federal court and could face up to 20 years in prison, a $250,000 fine plus restitution for each charge, according to the United State's Attorney's Office in the North District of California.

Peter Dawson is a digital reporter in Houston. Read him on our breaking news site, Chron.com, and on our subscriber site, houstonchronicle.com. | Peter.Dawson@chron.com| Sign up for breaking news alerts