July 2 - A Delaware magistrate judge has ordered JPMorgan Chase to continue paying the court-ordered legal fees of Charlie Javice, the former finance executive convicted of defrauding the bank. Magistrate Judge Christian Wright of the Delaware Chancery Court concluded that JPMorgan had not satisfied the "challenging burden" needed to demonstrate that Javice’s legal fees and expenses were "so unmistakably unreasonable or clearly abusive" that they must have been incurred in bad faith.
JPMorgan had argued that the payments it had been required to make under an earlier court order had grown to an "astronomical" level, and it sought relief from that obligation. The bank did not provide an immediate comment following the judge’s ruling.
Javice, 33, was convicted in March 2025 and later sentenced to 85 months in prison for defrauding JPMorgan into acquiring her education-technology startup Frank for $175 million in 2021. She is pursuing an appeal of both her conviction and sentence.
Under an order issued in June 2023, JPMorgan had been paying legal bills for Javice and for Olivier Amar, the former chief growth officer at Frank. Amar was convicted and received a sentence of 68 months in prison. JPMorgan asked the court to halt payment of Amar’s legal expenses as well; Magistrate Judge Wright rejected that request too.
The judge’s written decision specifies the amounts at issue. For Javice, the ruling addresses $10.1 million in costs incurred between January and September 2025. For Amar, the judge covered $11.3 million in legal costs accrued over a similar period.
Context and implications
The ruling leaves in place the prior obligation for the bank to pay sizable defense costs for both convicted former executives while their appeals proceed. The court’s language underscores that to overturn such an obligation, a party must show a particularly high degree of impropriety in how legal funds were spent - a standard JPMorgan did not meet in this case.
No additional factual findings or commentary beyond the judge’s statements and the sentencing details are included in this report.