London niche practice forced to pull training contract blurb from website after alleged striking similarities with wording of City and national firms were uncovered
It’s not been the best 10 days for niche London practice Kawa Guimaraes & Associates.
First the firm was exposed as demanding that cash-strapped wannabe solicitors pay for work placements. And this week Kawa Guimaraes faced allegations that it cuts marketing costs by plagiarising on-line content from larger counterparts.
The Canary Wharf-based employment law and clinical negligence specialist today pulled from its website careers section all information it had been promoting about its training contract scheme.
That move coincides with a report on law firm partners blog Roll on Friday that much of the content on that page bore a suspiciously strong resemblance to the wording used on similar pages by the London office of global law firm Baker & McKenzie and national practice DWF.
On training contracts:
On person requirements:
But now, anyone keen to apply for a training contract at the firm — including those poor workies that have had to hand over cash for the privilege of operating the firm’s photocopier — is met with a stark response. The training contract section of the firm’s website simply reads: “Sorry, but we couldn’t find the content you were looking for.”
Neither senior partner Mehedi Rahim nor managing partner Kate Kawa responded to Legal Cheek requests for comment regarding the plagiarism allegation. However, RoF published a slightly bizarrely worded statement from the firm, which suggested that it had been the victim of allowing a third party too much unsupervised leeway.”Thank you for pointing out, which we were unaware,” read the statement.
We will look into this right away as we had delegated the work for website construction and content to outsider.
Kawa Guimaraes is not the only firm to fall into this trap recently. Last August, Legal Cheek reported on Kent-based Manak Solicitors, which embarrassingly admitted that much of its “news update” content had been nicked from BBC and Law Gazette commentator Joshua Rozenberg.
That firm also pointed the finger at clumsy web designers.
Previously
Canary Wharf law firm asks students to pay to do work experience [Legal Cheek]