The Offensive Profession

There's got to be some very good reasons why such an important profession enjoys such low public esteem. Practitioners of the law appear in the minds of most people to be perniciously pre-occupied with building their bank accounts in as speedy a manner as possible. As do doctors of one stripe or another. And, of course, bankers and investment counsellors, and heads of large corporations. All of them studiously working their professions and salting away savings. And/or spending it prodigiously.

Somehow, though, it's lawyers who get the rap for it. Perhaps it's because physicians earn their keep by practising medicine and in so doing leave the impression that they care about their patients and do their utmost to diagnose well and prescribe efficaciously with the interests of the best health outcome uppermost in mind. After all, a physician whose lack of attention to his craft causing too great misadventure to befall his patients will soon become known as a misfit in his profession and lose his caseload as well as his patients.

Lawyers, though, have the reputation of being the raptors, the carrion-eaters of the professional world. They thrive on peoples' misfortunes. The impression the public has is that those in the law profession are a cold-blooded lot, eager for custom and charging outrageous fees by the minute. That each and every precious minute one's lawyer is on the job ensures that one's savings slowly flow from your pocket into their deep and capacious pockets.

Lawyers often seem to defend the indefensible, when it comes to criminal law. They will use every trick in the lawbooks to try to ensure their client gets away with murder, and they're often successful. It's as though law becomes a game at such times, the game being to be cleverer at what you're doing than your adversary, to discover and play upon precedents that appear applicable, to cajole and charge a jury through facile eloquence.

It's doubtful that there are many other comparable professions where a charge of $170 to $260 an hour for the privilege of hiring one's legal expertise is levied. Where away back in 2005 a contested divorce might come in at over $8,000, and where two court days in a civil trial might ring up to over $20,000. These are crippling costs, and they don't represent current costs, since surveys attempted in 2006 and 2007 were inconclusive because not enough lawyers bothered responding.

Little wonder then that middle-class Canadians are no longer dialling lawyers' numbers and are opting instead to represent themselves in legal cases. While there are some lawyers who provide pro bono services, and others who are court-appointed to represent low-income people through an admittedly inadequate legal aid system, the need for lawyers to cut consumers some fee slack is critical.

The cost of legal services is out of reach for most middle-class families, and it's escalating to the point where even greater numbers of people than the current 40% will begin cluttering the court system to represent themselves, as adequately as they can, sometimes with the patchy assistance of court-appointed interlocutors.

The chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada obliquely warned lawyers in Canada that their high fee structures are leading to an inaccessible system of justice for Canadians. And just recently Justice John Gomery (he of Adscam fame) after 25 years on the Quebec Superior Court, has stated on his retirement that "I don't think the legal profession is giving the proper attention to the problem and it's suicidal, the direction that we're going now."

Lawyers are defending their reputation by writing articles detailing how hard-working they are, what a service their profession offers to the well-being of the justice system in Canada, and they reject the charges brought against the profession that they're ready, willing and eager to sell out to the highest bidder.

Experience tells us otherwise.