In a bid to weed out fake lawyers who swindle money from unsuspecting members of the public, the Law Society of Kenya (LSK) is urging locals to take certain precautions before seeking legal services.

This comes after a man was arrested in Nakuru on February 8 for allegedly pretending to be a lawyer.

According to LSK Nakuru chapter chairperson Henry Opondo, there are ways of verifying whether the lawyer you are consulting is genuine.

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"We have two websites, the Judiciary Advocate Management System (JAMS) where all the advocates are listed so if a person clicks on that link and searches for the name of the advocate, it should come up. We also have the LSK advocate search engine where you can get the name, the registration number and you can also tell if they are active because we have advocates who have not been able to get practising certificates and therefore they are not allowed to deal with advocacy matters," Mr Opondo said.

Most of the fake lawyers, he says, act as brokers and that is why they solicit clients and pretend to be in a position to help them.

"They go ahead and charge them fees that are below the remuneration order and they are still brokering through some unscrupulous lawyers i.e. those who have been suspended to represent them in court. They have also infiltrated the conveyancing processes so that some of the processes are usually skipped, for example the payment of stamp duty, to make it a bit quicker," he said.

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In other cases, you would find that there are law firms that are well established in other cities and when they open branches in a new city, they lack lawyers in those branches to represent the clients.

"You would often find in such scenarios that the clerk and secretary in these firms get to handle the day-to-day and since there is no lawyer, they do not bill clients directly through the office and this leads to them running the firm on their own," he said.

A matter handled by a person posing as a lawyer is dangerous as it leads to the case being retried which is very costly as it often leads to a mistrial and also documents drawn by them are usually expunged and the clients end up being cheated.

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LSK fights to weed out fake lawyers in Nakuru

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Bret Sanya