For 38 years now, American Bar Association Techshow has has brought together legal professionals and technology. This year, the ABA Techshow will take place at the Hyatt Regency in Chicago from February 14 to the 17th, 2024. Come say say hello to the Margill Team at booth 332 to learn more about how our software can help your law firm with Litigation and Client finance.
As it revisits decades-old regulations on what constitutes a criminal interest rate, Canada challenges lenders to remain profitable under substantially tighter margins.
These Regulations are necessary to implement amendments brought by the Budget Implementation Act, 2023, No. 1 to section 347 of the Criminal Code. The amendments will lower the criminal annual rate of interest from the current 60 per cent (effective annual interest rate) to an annual percentage rate (APR) of 35 per cent. They will also narrow the types of agreements and arrangements to which this criminal offence applies. Though not yet in force, the Regulations aim to combat predatory lending practices and reform Canada’s framework for consumer financial protection and regulation.
To read the whole story by Guillaume Talbot-Lachance, Matthew Connors and Kaliopi Dimitrakoudis, follow this link.
Ambassador Lorraine Diguer and the team of trade delegates from the Canadian Embassy in Tunisia met with Mr. Marc Gélinas, founding president of the Canadian company Jurismedia inc., his team as well as representatives of their Tunisian partner DevXperts (5Xperts Group). The discussion focussed on opportunities in Tunisia in addition to celebrating success of this excellent collaboration between actors working in the field of information technologies in both countries.
On the picture, you can recognize: third from the left Patrick Bronsard, senior programmer at Margill, Marc Gélinas, Ambassador Lorraine Diguer, Christiane Duguay, programmer, Mario head programmer and Sophie Binette also programmer at Margill.
To see original post on Facebook, follow this link.
Joe Patrice, senior editor at “Above The Law“, offers a helpful guide for anyone wondering how borrowing works for different people.
Earlier this week, Jonathan Turley’s thirst for attention led him to go on TV to describe “car loan payments” as corruption that “none of us have seen the likes of.” Turley is, of course, an idiot. But it did get us thinking: what are the rules for paying back money you’ve borrowed? So we’ve created this helpful annotated guide!
To find out more, follow this link.
In February 2024, Google will update its Personalised ads policy to introduce new limitations on personalised ads relating to consumer financial products and services. Specifically, Google’s ‘Credit in personalised ads’ policy will be expanded to cover ‘Consumer finance in personalised ads’. The updated policy will read as follows:
‘In the United States and Canada, the following sensitive interest categories cannot be targeted to audiences based on gender, age, parental status, marital status or postcode.
Two former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. bankers want to take the $1.6 trillion private credit revolution from Wall Street to Main Street.
George van Dorp and Koen van Vlijmen, who both worked in the American bank’s London office, have built a product that matches small businesses with alternative lenders.
Take a look at this excellent article by Irene García Pérez and Silas Brown on Bloomburg News.
After many years of updates and new features, we are happy to release the new MLM User Guide for software versions. 5.5 / 5.6. The PDF file, which contains a total of 1241 pages, is mostly a document you can consult for specific matters. We do not expect you to read it entirely, unless you really need to fall asleep!
The Guide is the result of countless hours of labor by our Margill team in order to give you easy access to all the features offered in the software. It is complete with tons of images and examples to make things easier to understand.
You can consult or download the User Guide here.
Banking regulator says about $250B worth of home loans are either currently or soon to be negatively amortized.
Canada’s top banking regulator will soon implement new guidelines for the mortgage market, aimed at reducing the risks posed by negative amortization mortgages — home loans where the payment terms have ballooned by years and sometimes decades because payments are no longer enough to pay down the loan on the original terms.
Take a minute to read Pete Evans’ article on CBC news about the consequences on mortgages since the Bank of Canada has hiked interest rates multiple times within a year and a half.
Seamless Legal/Litigation Fees Finance Management and Interest Calculation for Law Firms with Margill Loan Manager
Many law firms, particularly, personal injury lawyers (accidents, injuries, claims, liability) will finance their client costs and fees until the settlement occurs, at which time they will deduct these fees, costs and now interest, from the settlement amount. With rising interest rates, it becomes increasingly difficult for law firms to finance their clients without charging interest. Money is longer practically free!
Managing this all the while calculating interest can become quite arduous without the proper system. For all the respect and admiration I have for spreadsheets and Excel, these just aren’t made for this (See Loan Servicing with Excel? Pitfalls and alternatives and 12,000 Reasons why to use Loan Servicing Software as opposed to Spreadsheets!).
Margill Loan Manager (MLM) can, using data from with your other systems, create the actual Case (more or less a loan), import case costs and fees (transactions) in bulk, and calculate the interest throughout the lifecycle of the Case. In some situations, a line of credit is afforded to the client where costs and fees (invoices) are added and payments made occasionally by the client to reduce the balance owed. This latter situation does not factor in success/non-success, so is simply client finance.
For litigation finance based on success, if a case is successful, interest will be charged to the client and fees reimbursed. If the case is not successful, no interest or fees will usually need to be paid back by the client, but the law firm will know its cost of capital, case by case. Most often, the cost of capital to the law firm (so the interest rate its bank charges) will be the same rate as the rate charged to the client, but it could also be higher (margin) to generate a little extra revenue. The interest rate could also be fixed or tied to the bank rate (variable interest rate loans) and could include a spread (so Prime + x%). Simple or compound interest can be used as the calculation method.
Main window where all cases are shown:
You could create only one “Fee” or multiple fees (up to 9 different names if needed).
Any other data can be entered as required (court case, client names, email, address, mobile, case type, active or draft, and other special data…).
This information is entered in the Data window either:
Since law firms can use a wide variety of systems – practice management solutions and accounting systems, a data conversion app may be required to convert third party data to a format accepted by Margill Loan Manager (JSON and Excel files). This can be developed by our programming team.
Typical Excel sheet for Case creation in Margill:
Principal amount is required but is usually 0.00 as case Costs and Fees will be added as line items (see 2) below)
The Case(s) will then appear in the Main MLM window with nothing really exciting so far – only the basic data. It gets fun when transactions are added!
For the bulk imports, the Excel sheet must follow this precise mapping:
For any auto imports, the ISO date format MUST be used: YYYYMMDD
3a) Cost and Fees (transaction) import from other systems
If your law firm must import data (transactions) from an accounting software (QuickBooks or other) or a practice management system and this system does not support the production of an Excel sheet as above, a special conversion application can be created by the Margill programming team that converts the file your system produces, to the Margill format which can then be imported manually or automatically. Such an app saves time and avoids errors.
4) Special situations
A host of special situations can be handled by MLM (the numbers correspond to the red numbers in the image below):
See the cool new features in version 5.4 released from January 22 to September 15, 2022.
For more details on the new additions, please visit the Release Notes page.