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NOVEMBER 23, 2011 ultravires.ca
ULTRA VIRES
OPINION
Point / Counterpoint
Legal Ethics: Why Oh Why oh Why U of T law degenerates debate whether you should pay attention during ethics week
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By Pete Smiley (3L)
Ls - Are you feeling ethical, now that you’ve sat through a week of droning presentations the gist of which can be boiled down to ‘talk to your superior before you do anything stupid’? I too resented my ethics week like a cat resents its Ewok Halloween costume. But now I’m entering my twilight years I can say with some certainty that legal ethics are actually very important. Here’s why. Enter “lawyers are” into google. Watch as Google helpfully autocompletes your sentence with “rats,” “scum,” or “liars”. Now try “my lawyer”. Google will autocomplete with “screwed me,” and “is suing me”. When a dispassionate search engine views your entire profession as universally despised, lying parasites, you have a problem. Your grandmother might pretend to be proud of you, but deep down even she is wishing you chose an honest line of work, like ‘tattoo artist’ or ‘energy-drink promoter’. It says something that the most prominent representatives of our profession are John Edwards and Kim Kardashian’s dad. This doesn’t particularly bother Andrew Robertson, who is used to people recoiling from him on the street and not letting him hold their babies. But I’m tired of getting spat on by women at bars when I tell them what I do. So for my sake, please take Ethics Week to heart, because you have no idea how many opportunities for unethical behaviour your future profession will af-
ford. You will be able to personally profit by lying, cutting corners, cheating, screwing your clients, defrauding your partners, and insider trading every single day of your career. Your income will buy you access to all the sex workers and illicit substances your heart desires (and not those cheap ones that Andrew Robertson uses). And you will spend all your waking life around people like him who are way more familiar with the vagaries of prostitution laws than they are with the Bar Association’s Code of Professional Ethics. The more you give into temptation, the more reason you give people to hate lawyers, and, by extension, me. But if my self-interest isn’t a good enough reason for you to care about ethics, then how about your own? Your fellow lawyers are watching you like a vulture watches a daschund giving birth, just waiting for you to slip up so they can email the details of your transgressions to Above The Law and then forward it to everyone on Bay Street. Nothing will actually happen to you (you have to show up in court in a cape sewn from the skin of your victims before they’ll disbar you in Ontario), but people will chuckle behind your back as you walk through the PATH, which is surely punishment enough. In conclusion, it’s in your interests to be an ethical lawyer, but more importantly it’s in mine. So when you find yourself tossing up whether to trade on your knowledge of your client’s impending merger so you can pay off your coke dealer, I hope that you will picture my chiseled and handsome face, guiding you down the path of right.
PHOTO COURTESY OF PETE SMILEY Pete Smiley does a little googling. We’re not happy with the resulting column
PHOTO COURTESY OF ANDREW ROBERTSON Somehow libertarian blowhard Andrew Robertson didn’t get the memo and wrote a serious article about access to justice. This will be his final column.
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By Andrew Robertson (3L)
miley tells you that it is important for you to be ethical, and I of course would never argue otherwise. Unlike Smiley, I’m not going to tell you to behave yourself just so I can lay on my thick accent in a desperate attempt to get laid in seedy hipster bars. Instead, I’m going to tell you why our profession is currently disliked, and why the people with a hate-on for us may actually be on to something. We all remember one of the main debates during ethics week: the everpresent problem of access to justice. The upper-middle and upper classes can afford lawyers, and because of Legal Aid, the very poor can also have access to legal help; however, there is a vast swath of people in the middle who are unable to access legal services. There are a ridiculous amount of ideas on how to confront this problem, but the solution is actually incredibly easy: require the law societies to drastically increase the number of lawyers licensed. The societies currently resist this idea, their argument being that an increased number of lawyers lowers the relative quality. This is undoubtedly true, but also inconsequential. In almost every other market you can think of (piano teachers, plumbers, engineers) there are those who are better and worse at what they do – and the market compensates accordingly. Currently, the law societies seem to think that it is better to not be able to get a lawyer than to get an averagely skilled lawyer. If you’re going to get sued, would you rather get a lawyer to represent you who went to a middling law school and was an average student, or would you like to self-represent? The answer is pretty clear. The other way in which lawyers have
been ridiculously good at perpetuating our monopoly is in the area of regulations. Admittedly, in a great many areas of life, regulations are a good thing– safety regulations and consumer protection comes to mind. But it seems regulations in other areas of life have become increasingly bizarre and complicated – ever tried to deal with your municipality for the slightest matter? Miles of red tape. And who profits from this, except for lawyers, who both write, and are the only ones who can interpret the regulations? It’s the most clear cut sign of a self-perpetuating job security scheme one has ever seen. Perhaps the most bizarre example yet I’ve heard of new, lawyer-made regulations come from the so-called “War on Terror”. Increasingly, when forces wish to conduct an air strike, or carry out a raid into a village, they have to consult first with a military lawyer, who can give them the go ahead. It use to be the rules of engagement were clear; but now, in order to go to war, you have to consult with an army of lawyers before using your actual army. Think of it this way: whenever two people want to come together, in ANY relationship one can fathom, a lawyer has to get in between them. Marriage? Pre-nuptial agreement. Divorce? Lawyer will help you figure out your assets. Employment contract? Lawyers have to determine the income tax. Sell a car? Lawyers in Ontario have constructed hoops through which you can jump. Want to kill Bin Laden? Lawyers say Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo. So, should we be ethical? Of course we should. But it’s a little disingenuous to argue for increased ethics in our profession when we are running a nice little racket. Instead of looking at surface problems (lawyers acting badly), the legal community should really take a look at the underlying issues of why the community at large doesn’t like us.