The long time it took for a lawyers’ association to investigate a complaint and disbar one of its members illustrates the need to change the way the profession is regulated, says a former law school dean.
In Canada, each province has its own professional association of lawyers who regulate, license and discipline their own members.
Clients lost millions
It took more than six years for the Law Society of Upper Canada in the province of Ontario to deal with lawyer Richard Chojnacki’s disciplinary case during which time it appears he stole almost five million dollars from unsuspecting clients.
The former dean of Western University’s law school, Philip Slayton has long criticized the system whereby lawyers’ societies handle complaints and police their own. He wrote a book about the problem called Lawyers Gone Bad in 2007.
Self-policing not ‘a good idea’
“No law society wants to admit too easily that a member of the law society is a bad guy,” he said in an interview. “The law society runs its disciplinary proceedings as it decides to do, so it draws up the rules. And I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
Slayton said that instead, an independent body should deal with complaints about lawyers. Parts of the United Kingdom took away policing powers from their law society in 2010 and put them in the hands of an independent ombudsman. Complaints there are now handled with twice the speed and half the cost of the previous system, according to the ombudsman.
Getting agreement to reform the system in Canada would be a challenge because law societies fall under the jurisdiction of ten different provinces and three territories.
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