An associate at Dentons Canada fell victim to a scammer who posed as a mortgage company representative and two bank officials to persuade him to transfer $2.5 million into the fraudster’s account.

A decision in a Toronto court revealed that the associate sent the money from a property sale to a Hong Kong bank account after he received emails requesting the transfer in a business deal, according to a report in the ABA Journal.

The Journal‘s Debra Cassens Weiss reports:

“The fraudster had sent emails to the associate in early January 2017 advising that money from the property sale should be wired to Hong Kong because of an audit of the mortgage company’s account. Dentons called the mortgage company, Timbercreek Mortgage Servicing, to confirm the Hong Kong account information but did not receive a call back, according to [the judge].”

The case came to light over litigation involving the firm’s insurance coverage.

Read the ABA Journal article.

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Volkswagen AG is paying out $175 million to plaintiffs’ attorneys in the $10 billion settlement over the “clean diesel” litigation. But many who say they worked on those cases won’t be getting any money, according to Bloomberg Law.

“Only attorneys chosen as class counsel in the consolidated litigation, and attorneys working on assignments from class counsel, are entitled to attorneys’ fees, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said Jan. 22,” reports Bloomberg’s Martina Barash.

“That means numerous attorneys who worked on suits before the appointment of class counsel won’t get paid,” she adds. “That includes for work they did filing complaints, attempting to negotiate early settlements, and fielding calls with clients and other attorneys.”

Read the Bloomberg Law article.

The U.S. Supreme Court rejected a San Francisco attorney’s request Tuesday to order Yelp to take down an online denunciation by a former client, leaving intact a California Supreme Court ruling that said the online review company can’t be ordered to remove libelous or offensive content, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

At the trial level, a judge had found the client’s attack on San Francisco attorney Dawn Hassell to be libelous and ordered Yelp to remove it. Later the state’s high court found that the removal order conflicted with a federal law that shields internet service providers from legal responsibility for statements posted by others, writes the Chronicle‘s Bob Egelko.

The suit resulted from a one-star review on Yelp that described the plaintiff’s firm as incompetent and advising others to avoid it.

Read the SF Chronicle article.

A new NAVEX Global webinar will discuss how to find the right approach to third-party risk management by applying appropriate risk factors.

The complimentary webinar will be on Wednesday, Feb. 6, 2019, at 10 a.m. Pacific time (1 p.m. Eastern). Anyone unable to attend the live presentation may register to receive a webinar recording on-demand.

Michael Volkov, an expert on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, will provide practical use cases and actionable steps, NAVEX says on its website.

Volkov, a former federal prosecutor, will discuss how to:

• Assess and define your third-party risk
• Build a best practice approach for your organization
• Handle potentially “high-risk” third parties
• Structure your program for maximum effectiveness

Register for the webinar.

Exterro has published its 3rd Annual In-House Legal Benchmarking Report for use in benchmarking legal processes against 110 legal departments.

The publication is available for downloading at no charge.

Exterro says its report provides information on:

• How in-house legal teams are leveraging project management principles
• What role technology is playing in achieving efficiency gains
• Which e-discovery practices are evolving and which are not

Download the Exterro report.

Attorney LeElle Slifer has been named partner by the Dallas-based trial law firm of Burns Charest LLP.

Slifer, who joined the firm as counsel in 2016, focuses her practice on complex commercial litigation involving a wide range of claims, including breach of contract, oil and gas royalty disputes, and patent infringement.

“Everyone who works with LeElle admires her legal expertise and intelligence, and her dedication and persistence in anticipating and meeting the needs of her clients,” said Dan Charest, co-founder of Burns Charest. “We are pleased to recognize those qualities in welcoming her to the partnership.”

Some of Slifer’s current representations include Kosmos Energy, in both Texas state court and before the International Chamber of Commerce, and Stonebriar Commercial Finance, in various federal and state courts across the nation. She currently represents wounded service members and their families bringing a civil action in the Eastern District of New York against six international banking organizations for allegedly conspiring with Iran to evade U.S. economic sanctions and conduct illicit trade-finance transactions.

Slifer has handled several significant appellate matters, including to the U.S. Supreme Court in Comcast Corp. v. Behrend. She represented the plaintiffs in DDR Holdings v. Hotels.com, where after winning a jury verdict of patent infringement in the Eastern District of Texas, her team secured an appellate victory at the Federal Circuit. Some of her other clients include Pizza Hut, Q Aviation, Black Stone Minerals, Torreya Partners, and Verdad Capital.

Slifer began her legal career in 2010 as a clerk to Judge Jerry E. Smith on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. In 2011, she joined Susman Godfrey LLP in Dallas before transferring to the New York office in 2013. She is admitted to practice in both Texas and New York.

She earned her law degree, with honors, from Harvard Law School in 2010 where she was Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy and a member of the Harvard Federalist Society. Slifer received her undergraduate degree with high honors from Duke University in 2007.

Burns Charest has offices in Dallas, Denver, and New Orleans.

By Justin Perkins
Contract Logix

With more than two-thirds of CEOs expecting their business models to change in the next three years, it’s no surprise that digital transformation continues to be a strategic priority for organizations of all industries and sizes.

What is surprising, however, is that a recent study by Gartner revealed an astonishing 81% of legal departments are not prepared to support their company’s digitization process. That’s a worrisome figure given that legal departments and the contracts they execute define our business relationships and are the backbone of any organization.

The good news for legal is that digitization, at least when it comes to contract management, has never been easier. By embracing software that’s built specifically to support contract lifecycle management, legal teams can shift from laggard to leader in the execution of their organizations’ digital transformation.

The question then becomes, where and how should a legal organization begin the process? Let’s look at the first and most critical step to take when setting the foundation for contract – and legal — digitization.

Digitize and Centralize All Your Contracts in Secure Repository
It’s not uncommon for legal departments to store contracts in shared folders across multiple locations and formats. However, centralizing your agreements into an electronic contract repository is the all-important first step towards the digital transformation of your contract management processes.

Think about how often you or your team need to reference or find an agreement. Whether you’re locating a specific detail or reviewing the entire contract before a renewal or termination, there are many reasons why an online, centralized repository is a foundational element to your legal digitization.

Not only will it keep your agreements organized, it greatly reduces the risk of contracts being lost, overlooked, and accessed by the wrong individuals. It will also allow you to access any document at anytime from anywhere on any device, and that ubiquity is a key component and driver for any organization’s digital transformation.

Another reason to digitize your contracts is so you can easily make use of the valuable data contained in them. Having the ability to capture, analyze, and report on data such as expiration dates, contract amounts, types of clauses used, and contacts will allow you to make much more informed business decisions. After all, digital transformation is all about improving your business processes and developing new business models.

As you begin the process of digitizing and centralizing your contracts – whether they are paper or already in electronic form – it’s’ important that your contract management system employs optical character recognition (OCR) technology. OCR automatically scans the content of your documents as you add them to the system regardless of their format. This ensures that all your contract data is easily found in the results of any search you perform, reports you run, or dashboards you create.

Takeaway
Centralizing all your contracts into a secure, electronic repository is the best and most logical starting point to achieving legal digitization. It may seem like a daunting task, but with help of contract management software, it’s not.

Cloud-based contract management software can be very easy and cost-effective to implement. You can start with a solution that meets the needs of your organization today. Then, as your requirements grow, you can add additional capabilities and user licenses.

Once you’ve built this foundation you can begin to embrace all the other wonderful features of contract management software that allow you to further execute your digital transformation strategy and put smiles on the faces of both your CIO and CEO.

Four lawyers with Farrell Fritz have received appointments from the New York State Bar Association.

On January 16, 2019, Robert M. Harper began a one-year term as Chair of the NYSBA’s Trusts & Estates Law Section.

Edward D. Baker, Cheryl L. Erato, and Nicholas G. Moneta were appointed Vice-Chairs of Committees of the Trusts & Estates Law Section and will serve three-year terms.

Baker is now Vice-Chair of the Continuing Legal Education Committee and Vice-Chair of the Sponsorship Committee. Erato is Vice-Chair of the Surrogate’s Court Committee, and Moneta is Vice-Chair of the Practice & Ethics Committee.

The Trusts & Estates Section of the New York State Bar Association has approximately 4,300 members.

Harper, a Garden City, NY, resident, is counsel in the firm’s estate litigation department. He earned his J.D., cum laude, from the Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University and his B.S. from Boston College Carroll School of Management.

Baker, a Plainview, NY, resident, is an estate litigation associate. He earned his J.D. from Brooklyn Law School and his B.A. from Binghamton University, State University of New York.

Moneta, a Rockville Centre, NY, resident, is a trusts & estates associate. He earned his J.D, cum laude, from the Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University and his B.F.A., magna cum laude, from Adelphi University.

Erato, a Massapequa, NY, resident, is an estate litigation associate. She earned her J.D. from Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University and her B.A., magna cum laude, from Stony Brook University.

Zapproved has published its Winter 2019 Volume of Ediscovery Case Law Summaries, featuring — as the company says in a release — “some heart-pounding tales of egregious misconduct by corporate and individual litigants.”

The quarterly publication can be downloaded from Zapproved website at no charge.

This volume covers a wide range of topics, from spoliation and sanctions to proportionality, scope, and technology. It includes cases where deleted evidence isn’t, in fact, spoliation; disparate outcomes regarding the form of production; and a brief discourse about how clowns are scary, but ESI is not.

Download the publication.

Above the Law reports that Cahill Gordon sources say that the overwhelming majority of senior litigation associates in a particular class are being asked to leave the firm before they’ve had the chance to go up for partnership.

Senior editor Kathryn Rubino explains:

“Multiple sources report the associates were told they weren’t partner or counsel material, given only a portion of their bonus and told they had six months to get out of Dodge. And even though pushing out these associates is being framed as connected to their inability to make the leap to the next level, sources say most of them weren’t even able to hear any reviews of their work.”

Read the Above the Law article.

Bloomberg Law reports that a second New York attorney caught in a money-laundering sting operation reported by 60 Minutes has received public censure.

The CBS program reported on an undercover probe by anticorruption advocacy group Global Witness in which lawyers in 13 different New York law firms met with an investigator posing as a German lawyer who represented a West African mining minister.

Even though the “minister” wanted to make some big purchases with money of questionable origin, only one lawyer immediately declined representation. Others were willing to discuss it and even offer suggestions, according to Bloomberg’s Martina Barash.

Read the Bloomberg Law article.

A federal jury in Miami set a $21.5 million verdict for a Haitian immigrant in a religious accommodation case who lost her job at a Conrad Hotel because she would not work on Sundays because of religious beliefs.

The Washington Post reports that Marie Jean Pierre informed the hotel when she was hired about a decade ago that she was a missionary for the Soldiers of Christ Church. Most of the time the hotel allowed her to have Sundays off, but in 2015 a kitchen manager started insisting that she work on Sundays.

“Pierre’s attorney, Marc Brumer, said the hotel had an obligation to ‘reasonably accommodate’ their employees’ religious beliefs — and argued they could have easily done so for Pierre. Instead, he said, they charged her with absenteeism and fired her,” writes the Post‘s Amy B. Wang.

A cap on punitive damages will limit the payout to about $300,000 if the verdict is upheld.

Read the Post‘s article.

The Environmental Defense Fund has signed contracts with two aerospace companies that will compete for the opportunity to construct the organization’s planned satellite project to quantify and map heat-trapping methane emissions from oil and gas facilities and other man-made sources around the globe.

A post on the Mitchell, Williams, Selig, Gates & Woodyard website quotes Mark Brownstein, Senior Vice President of the EDF energy program:

“Significant reductions in oil and gas methane emissions now can materially lower the rate of global temperature rise in our lifetime. MethaneSAT will give us the data we need to seize this moment.”

Walter G. Wright of Mitchell, Williams describes MethaneSAT “as using the latest scientific and technological innovations in sensor design, spectroscopy, data retrieval algorithms and flux inversions, a state-of-the-art modeling technique to distinguish emissions from ambient methane and trace them back to their source.”

Read the article.

A recent post on the  Farrell Fritz website describes the uses and possible pitfalls of using fixed price buy-sell agreements.

Author Peter Mahler explains:

“A fixed price buy-sell agreement is one in which co-owners of a business select a specific dollar amount, expressed either as enterprise or per-share value, for calculation of the future buyout price to be paid an exiting owner or his or her estate upon the happening of specified trigger events such as death, disability, retirement, or termination of employment.”

Fixed price buy-sell agreements in theory offer two main advantages over pricing mechanisms that utilize formulas or appraisals at the time of the trigger event: certainty and the avoidance of transactional costs.

Read the article.

A post on Foley & Lardner’s Labor & Employment Law Perspectives blog discusses negotiation styles for employers when the time comes for a new labor contract.

“There isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer as to what works best,” writes Thomas C. Pence. “Some people yell a lot and are very effective with it. Others try yelling and come off sounding cartoonish (never a good thing in negotiations). The best advice is to be true to yourself.”

Pence advises contract negotiators to be self-assured and determined in arguing their positions.

Read the article.

Above the Law  and Concord will present a complimentary webinar titled “The Process of Negotiating: Focusing on the Business Processes of Contract Management for Successful Negotiation.”

The event will be Wednesday, Jan. 31, 2019, at 1 p.m. Eastern time.

The webinar will be moderated by Brad Blickstein, consultant, speaker and writer on law department operations. He will be joined by Travis Bickham, VP of sales and marketing at Concord, and Jeff Barlow, co-founder at Nimble Services.

The webinar will explore how to reimagine the negotiation process as a business process:

• How to rethink contract processes to increase efficiency and effectiveness
• Negotiation processes, best practices, and how to avoid an adversarial tone
• Tools and technology that will help create repeatable, scalable processes

Register for the webinar.

Nearly half of corporate Legal Departments are working without a formal plan, according to Xakia’s Legal Operations Health Check.

In an article on the company’s website, Xakia said the survey polled in-house lawyers and legal operations personnel on five continents; it provides insights on the state of strategic planning within legal operations, providing data on alignment, metrics and more.

When accounting for size of the legal department, Xakia says, it’s clear that it’s smaller teams that are winging it without a plan:

• For teams of one to 5, 48 percent have no plan;
• For teams of 6 to 10, the same holds true – 48 percent have no plan;
• For teams of 11 to 50, 39 percent have no plan;
• For team of more than 50, 33 percent have no plan.

Read the article.

New York-based law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom has agreed to pay $4.6 million to settle a Justice Department investigation into whether its work for a Russia-aligned Ukrainian government violated lobbying laws, reports The New York Times.

“As part of the settlement, the law firm agreed to register retroactively as a foreign agent for Ukraine in addition to paying the government $4.6 million, representing the money it earned from its work in Ukraine,” write the Times‘ Kenneth P. Vogel and Matthew Goldstein.

The firm should have disclosed its lobbying activity for Ukraine under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which covers both lobbying and public relations on behalf of foreign political interests, the Justice Department said.

Read the Times article.

Politico reports that the Justice Department placed an online job posting for a pair of attorneys to tackle border wall litigation in South Texas — a sign of coming property seizures and other legal controversies that President Donald Trump anticipates if he plows ahead with his signature project.

Politico’s Ted Hesson interviewed Chris Rickerd, the American Civil Liberties Union’s senior policy counsel on border and immigration issues, who said the attorneys likely will deal with eminent domain property seizures and quarrels with landowners over what their land is worth.

The two advertised jobs, based in McAllen and Brownsville, will pay between $53,062 and $138,790, according to a posting to a federal jobs website.

Read the Politico article.

A former partner at Neal Gerber & Eisenberg has confessed to overbilling clients by small increments over seven years, starting in 2011 and lasting until August, when he confessed his actions to a practice group leader, according to a disciplinary complaint.

Christopher C. Anderson also previously worked at Kirkland & Ellis. Neal Gerber has refunded $150,000 to a group of more than 100 clients, and Kirkland & Ellis also decided to refund fees, reports Crain’s Chicago Business.

Crain’s reporter Claire Bushey explains how the alleged overbilling worked:

“On days he felt he hadn’t billed enough time, Anderson increased it if he didn’t think the client would object, the complaint said. The increments were small: He might record 30 minutes for legal work he completed in 18.

Read the Crain’s article.