Yesterday the Law Society of British Columbia posted the below warning on its website.
From a California lawyer, we have also received a copy of a message that purports to come from lawyer named Marcus Davis at this firm. The initial contact message the California lawyer received is reproduced below.
Attention real estate practitioners:
Fake law firm website used in new variation of bad cheque scam
Wagner Elliot LLP is not a real law firm, but in yet another twist on the bad cheque scam, a sophisticated fraudulent website (www.wagnerelliot.com) is used to fool you into believing that it is. . . . [more]
First of all, I’d like to thank Simon Fodden for inviting me to contribute to the site. It really is an honour to be able to contribute to such a well-rounded and popular blog.
Like my colleague Genevieve Lay (who also blogs on the site), I am a labour and employment lawyer at Ogilvy Renault LLP in Montreal. As a firm, we generally only represent employers. In thinking about how to introduce myself to the Slaw.ca community with my first post, I thought it best to talk about what I do and why I do it. Part of . . . [more]
There’s been something of a buzz lately among the law marketing crowd about putting QR codes on business cards — typically on the back, because they are ugly. (See, e.g. Shatterbox, Larry Bodine, ABA Journal.) It’s taken a while for this technology to percolate down to lawyers:these pixelated squares have been around for a few years now and mentioned more than once on Slaw: QR Code; Possibilities of Barcodes; QR Codes & Mobile Marketing. The thought is that a contact need only snap a photograph of your QR code to be provided with whatever . . . [more]
Following the first phase announcement of mandatory e-filing for certain BC land title documents that came on March 11th, Dye & Durham has developed and issued a new white paper discussing many of the issues to be faced by BC lawyers and notaries during the upcoming transition period.
The paper outlines the planning background behind the LTSA’s move toward mandatory e-filing, current usage rates of the EFS, training received by BC lawyers (only 4 in 10 surveyed), and the evolving digital role for BC Registry Agents.
As the author of the paper (and full disclosure, a client of ours), Dye . . . [more]
The latest edition of LAWPRO’s webzine has a number of articles specifically for litigators. One of them is an excellent paper from Justice Carole Curtis called Dealing with Difficult Judges.
Litigators of all stripes will find helpful reminders and suggestions on such topics as knowing your judge, planning strategy in advance, avoiding ‘head butting’, and protecting the record, your client and your reputation.
Justice Curtis alse describes the categories of difficult judges, and attempts to answer the question of the frustrated litigator: what does the judge want? . . . [more]
As those who read me will know, I’m a big fan of Apple products, the proud user of an iPhone. And I think Dropbox is a cloud with silver on the outside and on the lining. In the last couple of days I’ve learned about vulnerabilities for each that make me realize again how exposed my data are and make me more determined to learn about — and use — encryption.
About a month ago I wrote about a German politician who was alarmed at the detailed nature and the duration of the data kept by his service provider ( . . . [more]
I was surprised to learn, browsing through Bencher election material, that in the UK solicitors have lost the right of exclusive self-governance.
According to candidate Graeme Mew in the UK, self-governance of the profession has been “severely limited”. Solicitors in England & Wales, who used to be regulated by their Law Society, are now regulated by the Solicitors Regulatory Authority (“SRA”) which is overseen by a Legal Services Board (“LSB”). It is appointed by the government. According to Mew, “The obvious concern is that the governance of the profession will be influenced by government objectives which, in the UK, currently . . . [more]
Larry Lessig is famous for, among many other things, his dictum that “Code is law,” meaning that code in both legal and computer senses is a means of social control. Turns out, unsurprisingly, that people at his former home of Stanford University are working to see if they can actually make laws into computer code.
The wonderfully named Hammurabi Project from Stanford’s Center for Computers and Law is converting a few patches of U.S. legislation into machine readable C# in an attempt to express the logic and relationships of those provisions in a way that might allow facts . . . [more]
The features on professional networking site LinkedIn change frequently, so it is worth spending some time periodically to update your profile.
Earlier this month I attended the AIIP (Association of Independent Information Professionals) annual conference. I took a bit of extra time to attend one of the pre-conference workshops put on by Scott Brown, owner of Social Information Group, on using LinkedIn. It was good to have a current, detailed look at the network and its current features.
Allow me to share a few things I learned:
In this New York Times article, Gary Taubes joins two apparently well established medical facts:
Would this relationship be a basis for legal action? The Canadian sugar industry ships $800 million worth annually. . . . [more]
This project has been made possible in part by the Government of Canada | Ce projet a été rendu possible en partie grâce au gouvernement du Canada