Lawyers and scams

Out of the box

Lawyers and scams

By Rita Linda V. Jimeno

Twenty-five years ago, when I was barely into my second year of practice as a new lawyer, a client was referred to me. She and her widowed mother were desperately in need of a lawyer they could trust. The lawyer their family trusted deceived and defrauded them. Before they could understand what he was up to, he had succeeded in selling practically all their valuable properties and pocketed all the proceeds from the sale. That lawyer, who started from nothing except his guile and legal cunning—which he used to promote injustice—now owns two buildings and has been living in undeserved comfort.

I write about my client because she died two weeks ago. I went to her wake which was held in a small house in a remote subdivision in Caloocan City. It broke my heart to see her remains lie in state in such stark simplicity, knowing she grew up with the proverbial silver spoon. Her father had provided well for her and her mom, giving them a life of luxury. But when her father died, the lawyer they trusted to settle the estate left by her father took away their fortunes including the ancestral home in a city which served as the symbol of their prominence in the community. Perhaps, the legal battles she had waged for the past 25 years against the lawyer have taken their toll on her health. Her mom, who used to be a Doña, died much earlier in despair at seeing all their bountiful riches gone.

We had succeeded in getting the lawyer disbarred. To this day, however, we are still in court trying to recover the properties he had fraudulently sold to other persons who knew that he had no power to dispose of them. The Supreme Court, in his disbarment case, had clearly pronounced that the properties fraudulently disposed of by him, must be deemed to not have been transferred at all and should be returned to the mother and daughter even if the properties may have passed on to innocent purchasers. But implementing the Supreme Court ruling regarding the property issues, embodied in the disbarment decision, proved to be a tough challenge. Trial courts still allowed the disbarred lawyer, acting for himself or though lawyers, to delay and frustrate the spirit of the Supreme Court’s pronouncement in the disbarment case.

It is not easy to understand why justice is, sometimes, so elusive and why evil prevails at all in the world. I can only rest in my faith that there is a day of reckoning for every wrong one does to another.

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Lawyers who belong to the same breed as that one, who victimized my clients, give the legal profession a bad name. Because of them, jokes about lawyers’ greed and questionable character are a common fare. Ironically, many lawyers get scammed, too; sometimes, because of naivete and a trusting nature. More often, because of greed.

There is a scam unique to the legal profession perpetrated through the social media networks. The modus operandi of the con artists goes like this: an e-mail is received by a law firm from an alleged foreign company asking if the firm could handle a collection case against a local company which owes them a big amount of money. When one tries to be diligent by searching the Internet if such companies exist, one would find that, indeed, the creditor and the debtor companies both exist. Before the law firm could do its job of writing a demand letter to the debtor company; or filing a case in court for the purported client; the alleged client soon sends an e-mail that the debtor company has finally promised to pay within a certain period. And because the foreign company needs a representative in the country to receive the payment; and to file a legal suit in case the payment does not come through, the law firm’s service is engaged with a commitment that if payment is received, the law firm shall be entitled to an agreed percentage. Then, to the law firm’s joy, a check in hundreds of thousands of US dollars is delivered, payable to the law firm. The alleged client sends an e-mail that the law firm should deposit the check in its account and may deduct its retainer’s fee in full even if no legal work has actually been done. The law firm then deposits the check into its dollar account, eagerly anticipating substantial earnings from an effortless deal. After the deposit, in a day or two later, the alleged client will make an urgent call to the lawyer pleading that while the check is being cleared, if he could advance 50 per cent of the amount immediately. The alleged client will then explain that his company urgently needs the funds now and is willing to give the lawyer the other 50 percent of the entire proceeds of the check, even if the agreed lawyers’ fee was only between five and 20 per cent. Lawyers who get stunned and tempted by the generous offer will only be too glad to advance 50 percent of the face value of the check and immediately remit it to the account of the alleged client. Then the check turns out to be a dud but by then the lawyer would have advanced millions in pesos to an impostor whose real identity is not known. It will be too late for the lawyer to know that the company name used, though existing, does not have in its employ any person by the name of the con artist.

There is an old Filipino adage that says: Matalino man ang matsing napaglalalangan din (Even a wise a monkey gets fooled.) To the naïve ones out there: the rule of thumb is, when something is too good to be true, chances are, it is not for real.

E-mail: ritalindaj@gmail.com Visit: www.jimenolaw.com.ph