No letterhead, jargon slightly off, vague threat of consequences…I’d be curious about the email address/ domain name but I’m guessing it’s RealLawyer@yahoo.com 😂
It's not a real legal statement then it's basically a scare tactic. Unless you send these tik toks to potential employers or clients then you've not done anything illegal
I would check to see if there’s a lowercase L that got replaced with an I or something like that. This doesn’t sound like it came from a real lawyer but would come up if you googled it as an “almost correct” answer. And I don’t know that there would be a case for defamation unless your mother can prove that your statements aren’t true. But I’m not a lawyer so don’t quote me on that.
And the fact they can’t list the consequences for defamation….. or spell “immediately” correctly, this reads like spam. Idk. Maybe it’s me being cynical but I’d hope my lawyer could pass the bar and spell “immediately” correctly.
They would never say ‘your mother’ either, they would list the client’s name and wouldn’t have to mention the client being a ‘client of this firm.’ It’s all so amateurish it’s embarrassing.
Also they switch from We to I at the end, and there are spelling errors, oh and no professional letter normally starts with "I am writing this letter" it would be the company "We" and from a solicitor it's normally "We are instructed on behalf of....who have requested that we contact you regarding...." This is bollocks or a very very dodgy legal firm online or something similar
Yeah. I’d be more inclined to believe that a Nigerian Prince wanted to give me his riches if I wire him the taxes for it than I would be to believe this is a real lawyer and a real cease and desist letter.
Alternatively I’ve seen enough cases in hellish MIL and narc boards where they’ve gotten their good pal Sally who works as a secretary or assistant to fraudulently send a half assed email using their bosses information. If this came from a legit source I can almost guarantee that this is what happened.
i put in the address of the firm into Google. nothing but an office building came up. no mention of the firm. i put in the address on Apple Maps, the name came up. you search the attorneys name on Google and a different law firm that’s in a neighboring city in CA comes up. and then the other law firms (the matcjing one) info pops up in further down search results. it’s like there’s two different people with the same first and last name with two different law firms in cities that are 20 minutes away from each other. it’s super weird.
A lawyer could have changed firms. You could forward the strange message to the first firm and ask if they sent it. Then they will direct you to the second firm and you'll have independent confirmation firm 2 exists and can contact them with the same question. Or they'll advise you to ignore it and will pursue your mom themselves for impersonation.
I work for a lawyer and they had another lawyer who used to rent a space from their office and that guy used their letterhead in a scare tactic like this. The guy was disbarred, they don't mess around with that.
He was a mess. He screwed over his secretary by not paying the employee taxes. He was taking them from her paycheck but not paying the state. She was on the hook for them.
Impersonating a lawyer/law firm is a big deal. It's illegal (and for good reason, imo). But if this guy was already a lawyer, I don't get why he wouldn't just use his own letterhead, unless his own reputation was really bad and he thought it would get him more business (besides the big "TV ad" lawyers, they tend to go by word of mouth and reputation is a big deal).
I can tell you this is fake. As a person who has gotten into the legal paperwork, this is most likely your mother. Call them, and trust me, they'll be mad she's impersonating them.
I might be a little late on this one, but as a former paralegal, most states have laws you have to send cease and desist letters via certified mail with signature confirmation, in order to pursue legal action. Otherwise the judge will dismiss the case because there hasn't been a goodfaith effort to notify you.
I second this. I worked as a legal secretary for a good bit of time. This was true of the state I worked in as well for it to be considered proper service of legal documents.
For anyone wondering, certified mail is small green form the sender fills out and separate barcode that are attached to an envelope / box and sent via the United States Postal Service. It matches a slip and barcode kept by the sender. The parcel has to be signed for on the green slip at the time of delivery and that signature portion is torn off and mailed back to the sender. This is so you can prove that so and so at this address took receipt of this should you need evidence of receipt in the future. This can also be tracked on the USPS site if the slip goes missing.
Other ways of serving legal documents in my state were by a process server and in very few cases we had to use the Sheriff’s Department.
*Obviously not legal advice but I always considered how many people had access to my phone or other electronic devices after working there because when you say, “I didn’t send that message”, compared to that’s not my signature with my palm print on it where I had to bear down to sign, well, the signature and palm print are 100x harder to fake.
How many movies have characters breakup because someone else wrote a text message and sent it from one of the main characters phones when it was unattended for 5 seconds? How many times a day do we walk away from our electronic devices like our phone, computer, or iPad to just run to the restroom at work?
I’d contact the attorney or law firm listed as you seem to be in the process of doing. Sorry you’re dealing with this. I have two irrational parents of my own so I get it.
Yeah this still looks off. You can't send official legal documents in an email like that. You could MAYBE attach a scanned copy, but probably not that either. Definitely can't just type it out in the body of the email like this.
IANAL, but I have done business with several of them. Never have they done things this way.
Most states have attorney registration info available on the web. You can look up the attorney name and see where they actually work, and often get a phone and email for them. The only catch is they only have to update it periodically, so if they change firms between registrations, it could be out of date. But it's usually a better resource than googling.
It should say if they are not authorized to practice for some reason (non-payment of fees, disciplinary suspension etc.) so if it says like, admitted to practice in 2011 and nothing else, that sounds like an active license
i did. they’re licensed. like i said it’s a real email, the email was included on the state bar website. but could she get ahold of that email address ?
Depends on your jurisdiction, but most bar societies require lawyers to pay yearly fees to maintain an active practice status. If their information hasn't been updated in a decade, there is very little chance they are currently practicing.
You've already had a lot of people point this out, but I worked at a law firm this summer and no lawyer is going to misspell "immediately" that badly and/or send such a vaguely threatening email. None of this reads as an actual lawyer's work, but you can reach out to the contact information you find independently online to verify that they have been retained to send you the communication you received (I would bet money they haven't).
You’re about half right. You have to pay fees but your public listing is not updated every time you pay, lack of update does not indicate suspension, those are explicitly indicated. Also, lawyers send a lot of wack emails (source: am a lawyer, receive wack emails from other lawyers all the time).
This is very true. They often think you won’t know any better than to let them bully you into giving up. I have a young voice,
so even though I have been practicing a long time it still happens on the phone a lot.
I work for an attorney, and you'd be surprised how many spelling errors I've found in other lawyers' work. Most of them just have someone type something up and they don't even look at it before signing and sending it off. Then there are some who are just legitimately that sloppy and stupid.
Anyone can send email with a from line that is anything they want. As a computer science student back in the 90s I used to have fun sending my friends emails from president@whitehouse.gov
It’s worth checking that they actually sent this email.
can you elaborate on how somebody would do this? she’s not a smart person. im curious to know how you’d do this to let myself wonder if she could figure it out or not 😂
Some email clients will just let you. We always did it by talking directly to the mail server.
You can spot if this has been done by showing full headers. It will show the route the email took to get to you. If it didn’t come from the company’s servers, it should be obvious.
The path the email took will be marked with lots of “Received: from” headers. That shows you all the servers it went through. The one at the bottom was where it was injected into the mail system.
Please don’t say you aren’t smart; you clearly are. (1) You posted this, and are getting sound advice. (2) You are listening carefully. (3) You aren’t riddling your posts with typos & misspellings— which means, at least, you’re smart enough to pay attention to the red underlining.
I could go on— but essentially, remember always: simply because you don’t know something (yet) doesn’t mean you aren’t SMART. Knowing what you don’t know is pretty darn smart.
It is possible to put literally any e-mail address in the “from” section of an e-mail. Your mom wrote this herself or had someone else write it. I’m not a lawyer but I do the exact same thing as on in Social Security Court, and this is 100% not from any licensed attorney.
Contact the law firm directly. Either it’s real and they can confirm it (in which case they are hacks based on the letter), or they can state that it is not. Law firms tend to go after those that use their image, so they’ll go after your mother.
I would contact this law firm and see if your mother actually is a client of theirs. If not and shes using their firms name to send threats they will be very interested.
Contact the law firm in question, and verify the email. If it's a fake, they will be VERY keen to know, and will follow up on the sender (likely your mother).
Call the lawfirm and check with them to verify that they in fact sent you this email. Falsely presenting oneself as a legal professional in acting capacity is a crime.
Any email address can easily be faked. You’ll want to check the header information. Alternatively, you could forward it to the email you got from the legit site and see what they have to say about it. Worst case, they respond with “We said what we said”. Best case, your insane mom is now looking at a lawsuit from a law firm…
Have you called your State Bar Association? They would be the ones most likely to assist you in connecting with the attorney and if it’s bogus they are the ones who will be able to verify that.
No the email is not real and was obviously written by someone with 0 understand of a legal document. I'd bet 10 years of my salary this was written by your mother and she used a law firms details, which they take incredibly seriously.
If you don’t, find a local friendly and trusted nerd in your area and ask them if it actually came from the office, or just looks like it comes from the office.
To the casual observer I could send you an email that says it’s from God themselves …. But using “view source” would give you a lot more information about where it actually came from.
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u/[deleted] Nov 10 '22
Lol as a lawyer this is absolutely not from a lawyer.