OBA Working Group on Lawyers and Real Estate’s Documents for the Purchase of a Condominium
The Ontario Bar Association’s Working Group on Lawyers and Real Estate has established a sub-committee to consider the work undertaken in the purchase of a condominium.
The Subcommittee is working on various documents to assist real estate lawyers and their purchasers in a resale condominium transaction and intend to consult with and obtain a broad range of comments and suggestions from Ontario lawyers.
They have released for review the first document, a Master Chart of items to be addressed. The Master Chart is meant to bring to purchasers’ mind the items of concern and whether or not their lawyer will deal with it. For this reason, you will find each item has been marked as being Standard or Optional. The lawyer is required to address all Standard items as part of his/her regular retainer but Optional items will only be dealt with at the request of the client, which a lawyer may or may not accept, indicating any impact on the fees quoted. The Subcommittee intended to identify all matters which a lawyer should minimally deal with. It is expected that lawyers can modify the chart they will provide to their clients to include more items, if they so desire to establish that as their usual retainer. Your comments and suggestions are important to truly make this an Ontario-wide document which will be embraced by all.
You can review this suggested Master Chart. Please send any comments or suggestion to the secretary by email.
In connection with the questions I have raised about additional risks caused by having transactional documents in electronic form, I am interested to see that of the 164 items on the draft Master Chart, only a very few might change in any way or raise any special risks because of electronic communications.
The ‘verification of identity’ phase mentioned might be done differently if one had a remote client with whom one was dealing only electronically, but presumably one would also take special care if one had a remote client who was just sending in paper documents by mail. (So far as i am concerned, faxed documents are electronic communications for this purpose, unless one sees the signed originals later, in which case the faxes are used only for time-shifting.)
LawPro has lots of advice about frauds committed through bogus payments, but they are done as often as not through paper cheques, not electronic funds transfers – in fact EFT would be less effective for the kind of fraud perpetrated in these scams.
Does the Master Chart need any additional items to cover a situation where the main transactional documents – agreement of purchase and sale, mortage, acknowledgment and diretion (DRA) are provided to the lawyer in electronic form, and signed electronically? If so, what would they be and how would they work?