«Lawyer Valery Zinchenko: how legal information from the Internet may harm your business and health» — a column for Snob magazine
On-line legal counseling is gaining popularity along with telehealth and self-medication. Where there is demand, there will be supply: the amount of content, sources and services dedicated to legal matters on the web keeps growing. Valery Zinchenko, lawyer and Managing Partner of Pen & Paper Attorneys at Law explains what using the Internet as an adviser in complex legal matters is fraught with.
Recently one of potential principals at the very first meeting with me and other lawyers of Pen & Paper Attorneys at Law performed a medley of articles, commentaries and a detailed list of steps we, attorneys and lawyers, have to take on his behalf. When asked about the source of this amount of fragmentary and inconsistent information he proudly replied: “Google. It knows everything.”
The purpose of resorting to us in his case was the use of a lawyer's status to represent himself in a criminal case. And even that (as we concluded from the conversation) was just in case. Google said there was no risk of criminal charges in that case.
It turned out that our Google lawyer (and that's exactly what we call people who use the Internet to deal with complex legal issues, as an inside joke) has studied the Criminal and the Criminal Procedure Codes, although in his case he mostly relied on the Civil Code. It wasn’t easy to persuade the client that the result of his original Google plan could be at least a few years of imprisonment. The stage of acceptance, psychologically speaking, finally came after a number of meetings and conversations.
Another new Google lawyer convinced with the information he learned on-line, asked the same question seven times during one meeting. He inquired about the grounds for a bankruptcy petition and having been given the same answer seven times: “After the judgment on recovery of the amount of debt enters into force,” he uttered with disappointment: “It’s different on the Internet.”
In recent years we often hear about robot automation of the legal profession. One of the largest Russian banks has multiple times mentioned plans to replace in-house lawyers with robots. Perhaps this trend increases the number of Google-lawyers in the legal field and gives them additional motivation. Because if a robot using legal data bases and document templates may replace a corporate lawyer, why can’t a Google lawyer do the same? German Gref cannot possibly be wrong.
In fact some simple legal tasks can be performed by a robot and there are plenty of examples. Input some data into your gadgets’ mic and a supply agreement is displayed on your screen. Studying a data base of legal proceedings with the help of kad.abitr.ru is child’s play. Apparently, just like a Google lawyer can perfectly perform a simple legal task, and, for instance, represent themselves in a consumer dispute. Possibly successfully, too.
But the use of the web for dealing with complex and confusing legal matters, in which norms of civil, tax and criminal law may be intertwined, is equivalent to a legal suicide. Even a simple self-interpretation of a specific article categorized as harmless by a Google lawyer can often be a shot in the leg.
Joking and coined words apart: the trend for intensification of criminal prosecution of businesses is obvious. Practically every business action may be criminalized by law enforcement agencies with persistence and the right approach. Following regular economic activity, as our Google lawyer would interpret, a criminal case may be initiated on the following grounds: “...being an official exercising managerial functions in a commercial organization and acting with mercenary motives with the aim of personal benefit and that of other persons, with the intent to inflict grand pecuniary losses and material damage to organizations and individuals...” The range of articles in this wording is extensive: art. 159 of the Criminal Code (fraud), art. 165 of the Criminal Code (infliction of damage on property by deceit or breach of trust), art. 201 of the Criminal Code (abuse of authority) and even the new art. 210 of the Criminal Code, which has already stirred much debate (supereminence in a criminal hierarchy), which, for the information of Google lawyers, has been adopted not only for fighting crime lords.
Moving from the on-line to the off-line: recently a copy of the Law On Bankruptcy was found under the bed during a search of a businessman’s house. He liked to read it before going sleep. Later, according to the investigation, it served as evidence of his involvement in premeditated bankruptcy.