Check out a new column up at Slaw.ca authored by Noel Semple and on the topic of collegial reputation and the potential role it can play in helping clients be better informed when hiring lawyers.
Category Archives: Commentary
A Salyzyn: Law Society Complaints: What We Don’t Know and Why This Is a Problem
Posted to SLAW June 10, 2015
In many ways, Canadian law societies are now more transparent institutions than ever before. The Law Society of Upper Canada, for example, has adopted innovations like live webcasts of Convocation meetings, online Annual Reports and a frequently used Twitter account which allow for easier access and greater insight into what goes on at Osgoode Hall and why. And, of course, for those interested in what happens to lawyers “gone bad”, there is free public access to discipline-related decisions on CanLII.
Disciplinary decisions seem to be, indeed, one of the things that lawyers and the public are most interested in. In recent years, several high profile cases – including the ongoing civility case involving newly elected Bencher Joseph Groia, and the now-dismissed conflict of interest allegations brought against former Hollinger lawyers – have received considerable attention. Just in the past few months, the proceedings against a Toronto lawyer who received a five-month suspension after admitting to professional misconduct in representing refugee claimants has received significant media attention (see, here, here, and here).
A Woolley: Ensuring Competent Representation: Know what you don’t know
Alice Woolley posted to SLAW on December 29, 2014
Being a competent lawyer means knowing your own limits. Lawyers representing clients in cases for which they do not have the necessary knowledge and skills risk liability in negligence, being found to have provided ineffective assistance of counsel (in a criminal case) and violating the obligations of the codes governing their conduct. Those codes define the competent lawyer as “recognizing limitations in one’s ability to handle a matter of some aspect of it and taking steps accordingly to ensure the client is appropriately served” (FLS Model Code, Rule 3.1-1(h)). They further state that a lawyer ought not to take on a matter for which she is not competent and must recognize “a task for which the lawyer lacks competence” (Rule 3.1-2, Commentaries 5 and 6).
How difficult can this be? Quite, according to some recent media reports. While the facts as reported are not sufficient to support the conclusion that the lawyers involved acted improperly, they do at least raise the question: given the apparent disconnect between their expertise and their clients’ circumstances, why were these lawyers acting? And what lessons might we be able to draw to allow lawyers to appreciate when folding ‘em is wiser than holding ‘em?
Commentary: New Brunswick Real Estate Association v. Estabrooks, 2014 NBCA 48
By Stewart McKelvey
http://canliiconnects.org/en/summaries/29119
Conclusion:
“The majority decision in Estabrooks will be a good precedent for professional regulatory bodies sued for malicious prosecution based on disciplinary proceedings that turned out to be unfounded – and for counsel and litigants urging a cautious approach to the expansion of any contested tort. But as the dissent points out, there is now a conflict in the Canadian case law on malicious prosecution. It might take a trip to the Supreme Court of Canada to settle the dispute.”
Canadian Association for Legal Ethics / Association canadienne pour l’éthique juridique 