Canadian Lawyer

frequency (number of claims per 1,000 lawyers ��� a better barometer of trends) is up to 107 from 99 a year earlier. Yet Dan Pinnington, vice president of claims prevention and stakeholders relations at LawPro, says although the insurer deals with them regularly and on ���occasion we have seen some very large losses, either through lawyer fraud or staff fraud, I can���t say we have had an increase.��� Most misappropriations are committed by sole practitioners or lawyers practising in an association where they might share space with other lawyers but are running their own trust accounts. Most thefts are usually small amounts. Cases like Howard Lorne Tennenhouse, who was disbarred by the Law Society of Manitoba last year after pleading guilty to taking nearly $1 million from 54 residential school survivors, is the exception to the norm. ���Usually what happens is that it starts as a one-off that they just do for an emergency, then they do it a few more times and it goes from there,��� says Debenham, the author of The Law of Fraud and the Forensic Investigator. Defalcations committed by a partner working in a law firm are atypical, but when it happens the amounts taken are often sizeable. Ottawa lawyer Leslie Andre Vandor was disbarred last year by the Law Society of Upper Canada for misappropriating more than $2 million, most of which came from his father���s estate and Vandor Investments Ltd. He was also found to have misappropriated funds from Lang Michener, which in 2008 merged with McMillan LLP. The Perras case is all the more exceptional because it is a cautionary tale that underscores the exposure and ���world of trouble��� law firms can be drawn into when faced with a rogue partner. Kaufman Laram��e LLP, the Montreal firm where Perras briefly practised for six months in 2011, has been ensnared in the legal maelstrom and now faces five lawsuits from Perras��� former clients arising from the alleged financial fraud. Even lawyers acting on behalf of ���parties that were basically conned by Perras��� are sympathetic to the law firm���s plight. ���The circumstances here are horrendous for a law firm,��� says Neil Stein of Stein & Stein Inc. ���The last thing a law firm wants is to be sued. It is not imaginable that one of your own partners would put you into a situation of that nature. They don���t deserve it.��� The plaintiffs, members of Montreal���s Jewish community, claim they were approached by Perras to participate in business opportunities that required them to make short-term loans to be held in the trust accounts operated by the firm and Perras before paying out ntitled-2 1 a pre-determined rate of interest. The investors are suing Kaufman Laram��e for a total of $3.1 million, alleging the firm was negligent because it failed to inform them Perras was no longer a partner when they made the deposits, says the plaintiff ���s counsel Sylvain Deslauriers, president of Montreal law firm Deslauriers & Cie. The firm and Perras ended their partnership in June 2011, but Perras was allowed to maintain SPECIALIZATION IN BUSINESS LAW Classes Starting in September 2013 Part-time, Executive LLM program for corporate counsel and practising lawyers Information Sessions Thursday, February 7th, 12:00 to 2:00pm Thursday, March 7th, 5:30 to 7:00pm U of T Faculty of Law, Faculty Lounge 78 Queen���s Park, Toronto No registration required. Please feel free to drop in anytime during these hours. Taught by U of T Faculty of Law professors, together with top international faculty from MIT-Sloan School of Management and expert practitioners. TIME: EVENT: For more information, call 416-978-1400 or visit: http://www.law.utoronto.ca/programs/GPLLM.html Supported by the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) - Ontario Chapter and in partnership with Carswell, a Thomson Reuters business. www.CANADIAN L a w ye r m a g . c o m March 2013 35 13-01-07 9:58 AM

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