The declaration was filed April 8, 2024, in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of California. It was signed under penalty of perjury by an attorney. It stated that Tyler Brandon Davis was “the managing member of TopDevz, LLC.”
According to a federal RICO complaint filed nine months later, that statement was false.
The attorney who signed it was D. Edward Hays, a California State Bar-certified bankruptcy law specialist who practices with Marshack Hays Wood in Irvine, California. He signed a second declaration making the same claim on April 29, 2024. Both declarations, the complaint alleges, were submitted under penalty of perjury with full knowledge that they misrepresented the actual management structure of TopDevz.
Case 3:26-cv-00080-GPC-BJW was filed January 6, 2026, in the Southern District of California. It names 15 defendants and describes an eight-year alleged criminal enterprise. Hays is named as one of those defendants, described in the federal racketeering complaint as having served as “the architect of a bankruptcy fraud scheme” within the alleged enterprise.
All allegations in the complaint are civil and contested.
The Role of the Bankruptcy Court
To understand the allegations against Hays, it helps to understand what the bankruptcy proceeding was supposed to do.
TopDevz had been the subject of years of litigation by the time the bankruptcy case opened. The company’s founder, Ashkan Rajaee, who held a 51% ownership stake and the sole management authority under the operating agreement, was locked in disputes with minority member Tyler Brandon Davis, who the RICO complaint alleges had been trying to seize control of the company for years.
When the company entered bankruptcy proceedings, Rajaee was hoping for Chapter 11, a reorganization that would have preserved his role and given him time to restructure. Hays, who appeared as counsel in the proceedings, allegedly filed motions to convert the case to Chapter 7 liquidation, based on representations the RICO complaint says were false. Chapter 7 liquidation transferred control to a court-appointed trustee who had no relationship with or obligation to Rajaee.
What happened next is the core of the malpractice and fraud allegations. The court-appointed trustee, Christopher R. Barclay, allegedly settled all of the estate’s claims, which the debtor valued at $75 million, for a combined $200,000. Then Barclay filed a motion to sell the remaining estate litigation rights to Davis, the man the RICO complaint identifies as the head of the criminal enterprise, for $100,000.
The result: the claims that were supposed to hold Davis accountable were sold to Davis.
False Declarations Under Penalty of Perjury
The RICO complaint is specific about the mechanics of what Hays allegedly did.
ECF No. 19, filed April 8, 2024: a sworn declaration stating Davis was the managing member of TopDevz. The operating agreement on file said otherwise.
ECF No. 28, filed April 29, 2024: a second sworn declaration. Same false assertion. Same signature. Same penalty-of-perjury clause.
The complaint also alleges Hays transmitted a forged corporate governance document as part of the same proceedings.
In the complaint’s framing, Hays wasn’t an attorney who made a mistake. He was an attorney who used his professional credibility, the credibility that allows a licensed California attorney to walk into a federal bankruptcy court and have his representations taken seriously, to push through a proceeding that allegedly transferred $75 million in claims to the person those claims were supposed to hold accountable.
Marshack Hays Wood
Hays’s firm, Marshack Hays Wood (formerly Marshack Hays LLP), is a well-established Southern California bankruptcy practice. The firm’s website describes him as a certified bankruptcy law specialist with extensive experience representing trustees, debtors, and creditors in complex cases.
His California State Bar number is 162507. His license status, as of this writing, remains active. The firm’s address is listed at 870 Roosevelt in Irvine. Hays has been practicing for more than 30 years.
The RICO complaint does not accuse him of being a founder of the alleged criminal enterprise. It accuses him of playing a specific, critical role within it: providing the legal architecture that allowed a bankruptcy court to be used as an instrument of the scheme rather than a protection against it.
Why This Case Matters for California Practitioners
The California State Bar and the federal courts both have mechanisms for addressing attorney misconduct. Bar complaints. Disciplinary proceedings. Sanctions motions. Referrals for investigation. These processes exist precisely to handle situations where licensed attorneys are alleged to have abused their professional standing.
A federal RICO complaint that names six California attorneys across five law firms as defendants in an alleged criminal enterprise is not the usual mechanism. But it’s the one the plaintiffs chose, and it puts a question in front of California’s legal community that the usual processes haven’t answered: what happens when the attorneys allegedly orchestrating the scheme are the ones the legal system was designed to trust?
The case is active. Discovery is ongoing. No criminal charges have been filed against Hays or any other attorney named in the complaint.
Hays, through counsel, has not made public statements about the allegations as of this writing.
The views and opinions expressed in this article do not reflect the views of the California Business Journal. California Business Journal is not responsible for any damages resulting from the article and its comments, opinions and views. Views expressed in this article are solely those of
confraud.com and do not reflect the views of California Business Journal. Confraud’s information in the article is based on legal filings,
