The Written Word
for February 21, 2001

I have now spent as much time plus away from the practice of law as I spent in it. In fact far more time away. I started to practice in 1961, left in 1975, spent five years in government and now am celebrating 20 years in radio. I was always very proud to have been a lawyer. It was an honourable profession.

I say "was" because I think the past tense is to a fair degree accurate. It has now become a business exclusively, And it was once a profession that had a business element to it.

Let me explain. Everything we do has in mind the fact that we would like to earn a living. And very few of us are prepared to take a Franciscan vow of poverty. But when I practiced lawyers had not yet become hostage to the International Business Machine Corporation, better known as IBM. In fact the slavery of the profession to the computer master had just begun when I left law in December of 1975.
How strange it is when I think on it. In 1974 my firm in Kamloops had just installed a telex machine so we could, by typing in some words on a machine, send information to others on the telex system. A guy with a ridiculous crew cut used to advertise for CP-CN for telex and it was so very modern! Now the fax, which replaced the telex, is passe! Everything is online – and hugely efficient. And even more hugely expensive.

If I were talking about Victorian times, I would be embarrassed but it was only a few years ago that lawyers could still take cases they wanted to take and the hell with the money. Of course they couldn’t take too many of them – the banker, always your partner, insisted that you meet your bank loan requirements. But, dammit, you did a fair amount of work just because you really believed that it was important that it be done.

Now, I was no St Francis. But I think of two cases that I did in the last year of my practice. One involved a man whose business was on a railway spur line. Quite without any direct fault of his a fire started on his property and spread to a neighbours. He was sued. I lost in the Supreme Court but I thought wrongly. My client had no money but I took the appeal just because I thought he had got a bad decision. I won on appeal and even though I got nothing for my additional efforts I felt so bloody good for just having done it.

The second case involved two native boys, passengers in a car, who were hurt in a traffic accident. In those days for a passenger to succeed he had to prove "gross negligence" and in what I considered little less than a race biased judgment my clients got second prize in their fight against the insurance company. I took the appeal and paid for the appeal books personally and won a verdict.

I am not making the case that I was some sort of special case – far from it. Most lawyers I knew practiced as I did. We tried to maximize our billing time but we still did a hell of a lot of work that was essentially "pro bono".

What’s happened is that the computer and the inexorable drive by every lawyer to keep up his billing in the internal competition determines who will be a partner, and having decided that, which law firm will survive and which will die. The humanity has gone out of the practice of law. The duty to serve the client – indeed the taking on of a client – has become just a matter of money and no more.

The lawyer has gone from being a person who was respected by society to one who is – and I don’t think I exaggerate – if not despised is held in low esteem.

The interesting thing is that lawyers don’t understand this – not yet. But it is happening. An honourable profession looks more and more as having a lot in common with street walkers.

How sad it is – for as we move along into the 21^st century never has there been such a need for "mouthpieces" who are skilled in putting to those in authority the case for those ground down by the system and the huge bureaucracy it has spawned. And as this need ever grows, the services required are pushed out of reach for everyone but the corporate client with money and tax write-offs to burn.

I’m glad I was around to see the practice of law as it was when duty to client and justice still meant something to those with the monopoly of access to the man on the bench.