By all appearances, the Toronto firm of solicitors is a fine boutique, experienced in a wide-range of international transactional work,  Best of all is their commitment to the client:

At Wagner Elliot LLP w e are committed to providing commercial legal advice of the highest quality at a sensible cost. Our service is: • personal • proactive and • practical Our charging policy is: • flexible • realistic and • totally transparent

There is only one drawback.  It’s a complete fraud.  There is no law firm Wagner Elliot, as George Wallace details at Declarations and Exclusions.  Together with Antonin Pribetic, George has unearthed a few firms, all using the names and images of real lawyers, to manufacture fake law firms in Canada and United Kingdom.  And darn nice places to work and do business.

Lawyers in Canada have begun receiving solicitations from Wagner Elliot, apparently in need of local counsel to help with its burgeoning multinational real estate practice.   Dan Pinnington at Slaw has put out the word that this is a scam, much like the collections and divorce emails that have become pervasive across the internets. 

It’s hardly a complicated scheme, but hungry lawyers are, well, hungry.  And given how well established Wagner Elliot is, as demonstrated by their very fine website, how is a hungry lawyer to know?  And what a fine looking building they have.



By sheer luck, marketing guru  Seth Godin posted this very day about believing in the invisible.

If you are too trusting of the invisible, then you buy that $89 ebook that comes with the promise of instant riches, or you sign up for ear candling, or invest time and money with a charlatan. If you haven’t figured out how to discern the invisible stuff that’s true from the invisible stuff that’s a trick, you’re helpless in a world where just about every decision we make has to do with things that are invisible.

Thus, two kinds of serious errors: believing in invisible things that aren’t true, or insisting that the truth might not be. They’re caused by fear, by deliberate misinformation and by being uninformed.

How to discern between the two is our problem, not Seth’s.  That’s how marketing gurus roll.

The slope is becoming ever more slippery.  Only last week,  Brian Tannebaum wrote a provocative post about young lawyers learning to “fake it ’til they make it,” which brought out a surprising number of scoundrels asserting their droits moraux to hold themselves out in best possible light, even if that light is false and deceptive, providing that they believe that they haven’t stretch reality too far.  But at least these scoundrels were actually lawyers.  At least I think they were lawyers.

When all it takes is a website with some generic photos of buildings and the standard verbiage commitment to clients, it no longer requires lawyers to play lawyers on the internet.  The potential is huge, and it can save young lawyers a fortune in law school debt. 

There have been individuals who pretended to be lawyers before.   Dan Penofsky immediately comes to mind, a New York City Assistant District Attorney (and a pretty darn good one) who, as it happens, wasn’t a lawyer, but who managed to get away with playing prosecutor for decades. He tried a good case and was a formidable adversary.  And he didn’t even have a website.

The interwebz is the land of opportunity for the invisible, and as every social media guru and legal marketer points out, all it takes to gain fabulous wealth in the law is to know how to play the internet marketing game better than the lawyer next door.  So if you’re not as adept as your neighbor, or perhaps too shy and reticent to puff your way to fame and fortune, perhaps your best route to success is to get a job with a law firm that has mastered social media and self-promotion.

I hear Wagner Elliot, LLP, would be happy to take you on.  Just send in your equity stake and wait for instructions.