This is not the kind of thing I normally post here, but Oklahoma lawyer Stephen Jones wrote a "Saturday Essay" for the Wall Street Journal called The Case for Unpopular Clients. Since he was appointed to represent Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, he has some personal experience with this and urges that lawyers continue to take on controversial cases.

I refer you to one of the best things you will ever read on avoiding a check scam loss. It is suitable for forwarding to your clients and non-lawyer friends. Kudos to MaAfee & Taft lawyer Robert T. Luttrell III for his piece Check Scams That Target Lawyers in the March, 2010 Oklahoma Bar Journal.

This brief article covers what the bank representative is really telling you when you think you are hearing that the check is good, the sequence of three events to help you spot a check scam no matter which variation ot the scheme you see and the one sure-fire way you can avoid a loss on a particular item, even if it costs you a small fee.

The scams continue. Just today I learned of a Houston lawyer who lost $182,500. The Oklahoma Bar Association has now launched a special web page to provide information on avoiding scams at http://www.okbar.org/scams. This truly would be a good article to pass along to everyone you know.

A recent blog post about why lawyers don't return client calls sort of rubbed me the wrong way. That was the intention of the poster to a certain extent as he indicated many prior treatments of the topic were sugar coated. The post was entertaining and provocative, but I wasn't inclined to pass it along to others.

Well, leave it to my honorary cousin, Laura Calloway of the Alabama State Bar, to pull out some key points from this post for a responsive post of her own: Maybe Your Lawyer is Drunk? She makes some good points and shows her good humor on the topic. She also includes a link to the original post.

I often talk to young lawyers about the importance of returning client phone calls. The failure to do this promptly creates larger problems than may actually be justified. Many clients have no idea how many calls a lawyer may receive daily. So they may take the non-return as personal when the lawyer is simply applying triage by returning the priority calls first. Calls about a matter when nothing is scheduled this month or when the client wants to repeat the same conversation for the third time this week get a lower priority than some others. Clients rely on lawyers to handle things that they cannot. So the "failure" of the lawyer to do something simple that anyone can do raises concerns about how everything else is being handled.

The successful lawyer will have a written policy on how quickly calls will be returned, cover that policy with new clients when new matters are opened and make certain law firm staff understands that their job is to help return calls when the lawyer is unable to do so. It is always better for the client to hear from the staff than to hear nothing.

Cousin Laura and I agree on one thing for sure. Return those phone calls and stay out of trouble.

Let me start by saying that whatever you think you know about cashier’s checks and certified checks being secure simply doesn’t apply any more. Some forged bank checks are so good that you cannot distinguish them from the real thing simply by looking at them. Please make sure that your staff, your colleagues, your clients and your friends understand this.

Dan Pinnington did a great blog post titled Keep your guard up: Bad checque scams targeting lawyers are getting more sophisticated after he and I talked yesterday. Please read his post. Consider forwarding the link to others.

A new wrinkle is the scammer calling other professionals (like real estate agents) to get the names of local lawyers and then using that person’s name when they contact the lawyer to give them more credibility. A referral from a local businessperson isn’t going to be a scammer, right? There are reports of this fraud expanding and that is why this is a good topic for a law firm client newsletter. A person who is trying to sell a house might hear from a foreigner who is going to move to the state and wants to buy the house. They send a large certified check as a deposit and then a few days later note that a tragedy has occurring preventing them from moving. They ask the person to return part of the deposit, keeping a nice portion for their trouble.

While we have typically seen these checks in the mid six figures, Dan notes that the amounts are becoming lower to make them seem less suspicious. Let’s face it. Stealing $50,000 ten times a year is a pretty good living for a thief.

Spread the word and be on guard.

 

With the world's attention focused on Canada for the Olympics, now is a great time to highlight a relatively new Canadian blog. The Canadian professional liability insurer LAWPRO®'s practice assistance unit, practicePRO, launched the AvoidAClaim blog several months ago. The blog notes that AvoidAClaim has a narrow and specific focus: helping lawyers avoid legal malpractice claims. The blog has already had some good posts, including Sitting on a Non-profit Board: A Risk Management Checklist and Lawyer/Client Communication Errors Are The Biggest Cause Of Malpractice Claims.

Of course, those of us who follow these things knew it would be a valuable resource since it was under the stewardship of my good friend, Dan Pinnington. Dan is Director of practicePRO, Editor in Chief of Law Practice Magazine, co-author of A Busy Lawyer's Guide to Success and a former chair of ABA TECHSHOW. So keep up the good work, Dan, and keep up the ongoing information flow on risk management for lawyers.

I love ABA TECHSHOW. I learn more at ABA TECHSHOW than any other conference. Early Bird Registration deadline for ABA TECHSHOW is today- February April 19, 2010. Go here to register. The lineup of scheduled presentations is online here. Not only do you have your choice of many educational session while at the confrence, but the conference CD has the materials from all of the sessions. Pack lightly because you may be bringing back a lot of reading material and other goodies from the vendor exhibition hall. See you there!

Before I direct you to Mongo, let me note two really great lawyer-columnists who no longer write their columns. In bygone days, there was one primary source for lawyers for information about technology advances. Each month in Law Practice magazine, Burgess Allison used to write Technology Update. His humor was great. I used to LOL reading this column before most of us had seen it typed as LOL. And no one could skewer Microsoft as well as Burgess. We miss you, Burg. Maybe you need to take up Twitter?

Another great column was McElhaney on Litigation in the ABA Journal by Jim McElhaney. Talk about learning at the feet of a master! Although this no longer appears as a regular column, the ABA Journal still runs reprints occasionally because his advice is great and timeless.

This brings me to Mongo. The February 2010 ABA Journal has reprinted a July 1995 McElhaney on Litigation column now-titled Meet Mongo. The tag line says "Unleashing your inner beast in Court hurts you, not the other side." Every lawyer should read this one, even non-litigators. It is funny and so very true. Many of us have had that moment in court where some inner Mongo whispered for us to lash out or otherwise misbehave.

If you want some more good reading and good advice for courtroom lawyers, just input "McElhaney on Litigation" into Google or your search engine of choice. But perhaps you should do this on a date without a lot of deadlines. You could be reading for a while.

For years, Texas lawyers enjoyed the humorous columns of Judge Buchmeyer. In his memory, a group of Texas lawyers has now launched OverheardInCourt.com. They invite you to submit your funny courtroom stories and are even offering some cash prizes this month for those selected among the submissions. Every trial lawyer has a few great stories, so send them in. No lawyer jokes are needed.

I don't generally do "year in review" pieces even I though I do a CLE program on that topic each December for Oklahoma Bar Associations's annual Recent Developments CLE. But this year, even as the economy was still weak and business was not generally good, there was a lot going on with technology advances. When I started writing 2009 in Review: Looking Back and Looking Forward for the January 16, 2010 Oklahoma Bar Journal, I planned to just look at the past year's developments. But I ended up noting many trends that seemed to me to be the beginning of even bigger changes. I also linked to some other interesting articles on this subject. (By the way, the links work much better in this online version than in the paper version of the Oklahoma Bar Journal.)

So check out my predictions. Like any good prognosticator, they are a bit vague. But I certainly see several major trends ahead. It's the proverbial win-win. If I am correct, you learn something. If I'm all wrong, you get the opportunity to point out how wrong I was when you see me in the future.