Managing risk in your legal practice can be as simple as carefully proofreading the documents you create for your clients.  Nora Rock’s recent post on the AvoidAClaim blog emphasizes the importance of proofreading a will as a means to protect against future malpractice claims.  She outlines a 10-step system and notes that:

“There are not many guarantees in life, but this is one of them: If you proofread – properly – each and every will you create, you will substantially reduce your risk of a malpractice claim.”

Lawyers in North Carolina have reported receiving an email, purportedly from another lawyer known to them advising of a document uploaded to Google Docs and requesting that the recipient “Click here” to review the documents.  

Warren Savage, claims counsel with Lawyers Mutual, reported on this phishing scam in the company’s March 2014 newsletter, noting that the result for one lawyer who clicked the link was that her email account was hacked, and the hackers subsequently sent instructions to the lawyer’s bank to wire funds from the lawyer’s trust account.  Savage warns that:

“The original email you receive is especially tantalizing because the supposed sender of the email is usually someone with whom you have had email correspondence in the past, oftentimes a fellow attorney you know and trust. Instead, the only reason you got this email is because the email account of that person has been hacked, and the hackers are now using his email contacts in an effort to spread their “phishing” expedition.  Also, if you have exchanged electronic documents with that attorney by email in the past, the invitation in the email to get the “very important” document form the Google.docs link may dupe you into thinking that the email is legitimate.”