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Lewis S. Eisen
Lawyers are being targeted by an Internet rogue who sends mass e-mails to the profession.
The Canadian Lawyer Index is an Internet site that bills itself as the most complete lawyer referral service in Canada. It also purports to offer a department for complaints against lawyers.
The man behind the website, John Styles, has been soliciting paid advertisements from law firms, although he refuses to remove lawyers' names from his mailing lists when requested.
Mr. Styles has not made many friends among the profession with his service.
At the website, an individual can ask to be referred to a lawyer for a particular problem. Mr. Styles e-mails that request to lawyers all over the country, with a note to contact the potential client directly.
This form of mass e-mailing, known among Internet users as "spam," is widely regarded as an abuse of the Internet.
Lawyers who have called or written Mr. Styles to complain about the unsolicited messages, or who have asked to be removed from the mailing list, have been met with rude, invective-loaded responses.
According to InterNIC registry records, the domain canlaw.com is hosted by Nexx Online, an ISP in Toronto.
Suhan San, a manager of Nexx Online, says there has only been one complaint about Mr. Styles, and that was two months ago. A lawyer had complained that Mr. Styles refused to remove his name from the mailing list. Mr. Styles was spoken to, and the lawyer's name was removed shortly after that--although the lawyer did receive a hostile message about it from Mr. Styles.
Mr. San assured The Lawyers Weekly that Nexx Online does not tolerate illegal or improper activity, and that it would close the account of any offender.
Anyone who requests removal from Mr. Styles list and is refused can complain to admin@nexx.com or (416) 665-7450 and action will be taken.
In the definitive display of chutzpah, Mr. Styles has lately taken to sending out faxes to lawyers, asking them to place paid advertisements with his service. But other than the incident two months ago, Mr. San said that there had been no other complaints.
Stuart Morrison, publisher of Canadian Lawyer and Law Times knows better. Dozens of law firms have written to Canada Law Book angrily demanding to have their names removed from this mailing-list.
When Canada Law Book advised Mr. Styles that it owns the Canadian trademark CanLaw, the response was particularly vituperative.
Nonetheless, Mr. Morrison remains unruffled by the problem. Mr. Styles is "rude, but otherwise he's insignificant as a threat," he assures.
The Law Society of Upper Canada apparently agrees. While Mr. Styles claims to receive complaints against lawyers, the result from their point of view is benign. "Anyone can accept a complaint about a lawyer," says Steven Heipel, spokesperson for the Law Society of Upper Canada, "but in Ontario no one besides us can do anything about it."
Mr. Heipel doesn't believe the public will be misled, noting that one can always call the Law Society to determine if a lawyer referral service or complaint service is authorized by the Society (none are).
"The web has allowed a proliferation of similar names, letting organizations mimic corporate entities," says Stuart Morrison. "People should bookmark the correct sites carefully and ignore the hundreds--soon to be millions--of pretenders."