Today’s episode features the story of a family self-represented litigant, who was originally represented by two different lawyers. She spent $20,000 on her first lawyer – resolving an uncontentious custody issue – but made no progress toward child support or division of assets. The second lawyer cost her another $25,000 – and still didn’t resolve child support, division of assets, or divorce. Her best efforts to obtain any information about what her money had been spent on, or to hold her lawyers to account via their professional regulator (the Law Society of Ontario) led… nowhere. Jana Saracevic and Nancy Cameron Q.C. comment.
Among other things, this story illustrates the shortcomings of the Law Society of Ontario’s Compensation Fund, which offers no protection for many forms of negligence, only dishonesty, which is narrowly defined. There are no public reports describing how many claims are received and how many are met. You can read more here about the scheme here:
Law Society of Ontario Compensation Fund
The Lawyers Fund for Client Compensation Committee Report to Convocation, 1997 (LSO)
In Other News
Jordan Furlong
Guest Other News Correspondent Jordan Furlong focuses today on breaking news from the Law Society of Ontario: The Law Society’s Technology Task Force has released a report calling for the establishment of a Regulatory Sandbox for Innovative Technological Legal Services. (A Regulatory Sandbox is essentially a safe space for innovation, to try out new types of services that are prohibited by current regulations but look like they could be beneficial to the public.) The report includes a motion to be brought before Convocation later this month for approval of the Sandbox for a five-year pilot-program period.
Technology Task Force announcement of Regulatory Sandbox proposal (LSO)
“The Paradigm Shift of Regulatory Sandboxes” by Jordan Furlong (Slaw, Dec 2020)
Jumping Off the Ivory Tower is produced and hosted by Julie Macfarlane and Dayna Cornwall; production and editing by Brauntë Petric; Other News produced and hosted by Jordan Furlong; promotion by Moya McAlister and the NSRLP team.
We refer to the legal process as adversarial but that describes the relationship between the parties to the action. Another underlying problem with ‘how the money gets spent’ is that the relationship between the lawyers is collegial and the system is set up to ensure they treat each other with great consideration. As a result, delays or multiple rescheduling of hearings, extending time to provide answers, following-up on missed information or invisible attachments to correspondence are accepted as necessary courtesies to the opposing lawyer and clients are told that they need to make ‘reasonable’ accommodations. Since lawyers charge by the hour, there is little detriment to them but it drives up the clients’ costs and mucks up the court scheduling as well. I can’t think of any other profession which rewards inefficiencies and delay in this manner. The backwards nature of the incentives is something which needs to be addressed.