89 Replies to “Are Lawyers Rats?”

  1. Let’s not get carried away now. I know some really, really good people who also happen to be lawyers.

  2. Is it just a case of the Defence Trial Lawyers spoiling the barrel ??
    With the Charter acting as the fungus ??

  3. So the CBA wants Khadr returned to Canaduh for a “fair trial”? Yup….get him back here so we can get him house arrest,his welfare entitlements,plus he’s old enough now to vote for the leftards!
    Ron…you are correct. The criminal defence lawyers are second only to terrorists. Just ONCE, I would love to see some pervert get house arrest,and the judge tell him/her that they must serve it in their defence lawyers house!

  4. Ron, we are talking about lawyers as a group, not individuals. I have taxed two lawyers for overbilling and won both times.
    I also have a couple of friends who are lawyers. Honorable men who confirm that collectively, lawyers are rats. Judges are lawyers too, which explains the travesties of justice we so regularily see.

  5. In the old days we used to kill each other when we disagreed. Pistols at dawn and such. Now, with the benefits of the rule of law and order, we go to court instead. So instead of our seconds carrying our pistols, now they are our lawyers.
    Since we now-a-days heap all our problems onto the shoulders of our lawyers, it reasonably follows that lawyers get tarred with the brush of our worst behaviour. Sure, I think lawyers get paid too much, compared to doctors and engineers, but then maybe that’s their actual free-market value.
    Everybody hates lawyers, except the one that successfully defends them.

  6. Generalization alert!
    Just because the CBA leadership is a proxy for the Liberal Party, doesn’t mean every lawyer is terrible.
    There are good ones and bad ones, just like in any other business. There is a higher concentration of bad ones in areas of law such as personal injury, malpractice, and many other subsets of civil and criminal law.
    Criminal defense lawyers simply do their job in the system of the rule of law. If no lawyer defended someone who may or may not be innocent, we would end up with a system like Iran.
    Of course, that doesn’t mean our judiciary is full of morons, but they were appointed for political reasons, and we all know who has been in power for the majority of Canadian history.

  7. As a (non-practising) lawyer myself, I must say that there was nothing in the Maclean’s article that suprised me.
    Yes, there are many good people who are lawyers, and some of them are my friends. But, the requirements of the profession encourage a litany of unethical activities, and attracts a significant number of people who enjoy that type of behavoir (hence why I do not practice).
    As for Khadr, isn’t it tradtional just to have him “killed while attempting escape”?

  8. Lawyers live off of peoples’ hardships. They are leeches. Look at Tony Merchant’s law firm/ 40,000,000.00 off the backs of the abused. How does he sleep at night? His son was recently disbarred in Alberta then reinstated.

  9. Canadian Bar Association President J. Parker MacCarthy said of Khadr’s life path “It would be unimaginable that this could happen to a 15-year old in Canada.”
    That’s really true. It IS unimaginable for this to happen to a fifteen year old in Canada — not unwelcome, just unimaginable. Thing is, there’s no need to imagine anything of the sort, because the events didn’t happen in Canada. Even now, nothing is happening in Canada; Khadr took a trip, and ended up somewhere else. That’s where it’s happening.
    The idea that one should be able to wield a Canadian connection as some “get out of life free” card is a byproduct of devaluing Liberal-promoted relativism. Khadr didn’t kill an allied soldier in Canada, and he didn’t kill on behalf of Canada; he was an enemy combatant abroad with an LPC passport — an irrelevent piece of happenstance that has nothing to do with his family’s preferences — fighting against our allies for a cause perfectly antithetical to that of our own nation.
    “His lawyers maintain…” (that he is enduring horrible conditions.)
    That’s their job. It’s not Canada’s job to maintain such arguments on Khadr’s behalf as his — probably LPC-connected — lawyers do, nor take at pure sweet face value the utterances of every lawyer plying his trade around the limits of immigrant issues.

  10. Yet it remains the case, EBD, that a set of one or more examples of lawyers that are wrong, for one’s value of wrong, no more vilifies the set of all lawyers than does a set of equivalent examples regarding doctors, or engineers, for one’s value of wrong. The danger presented by maltargeted vilification is that one may find oneself without valid allies, in cases where one’s value of wrong does not apply.

  11. Jeepers, Vitruvius, I didn’t slander lawyers in a general sense at all. And I didn’t even suggest that my personal/spiritual evaluation of their fee schedule might be something subject-worthy; that was you, in your 1:49 post. I merely commented on the Khadr case, and on a couple of pronouncements from the head of the CBA.
    I mean, I could have added that if a citizen blogger, say, who has written nothing libelous is effectively silenced by a slap suit because he can’t afford to mount a defense, it speaks something bespeakable which won’t be spoken about afterwards. The fallout isn’t about defending or attacking lawyers, it’s about information flow.
    To anyone who might be unencumbered, momentarily or at length, from facing such t considerations, perhaps due to his own politeness, I’d just say “bless you and the lawyer you rode in on.”
    Unless, of course, your lawyer isn’t bitch-slapping someone to shut them up on behalf of his client.
    The bottom line is, some of my best friends are lawyers. I strongly agree with commenter “common sense” who, referring specifically to Kate’s post, wrote: “Just because the CBA leadership is a proxy for the Liberal Party doesn’t mean that every lawyer is terrible.”
    It’s just so true.

  12. yes, this won’t do me an ounce of good, but it’s my “charge of the light brigade” complex. The macleans article concerned high paid, large firm bay street lawyers. They operate on their own planet, which i have only glimpsed through a telescope. Read Byfield’s column in the Sun on this topic – i doubt you’ll take my word for it.
    As for the kadhr thing – once again, it’s the Canadian Bar Association, a voluntary association of lawyers which many do not belong to, or agree with. Including me.
    BTW, some of you seem to have the law mixed up with lawyers. I’m not sure if you’re just venting, or honestly this confused. I suppose there are high ranking government lawyers who coud be accused of writing the law – most of us aren’t that powerful.
    You may resume. Just do me one favour: skip the misused quote from Shakespeare. Nobody seems to understand the context or what he was talking about.

  13. What does it matter that the Canadian Bar Association is a group with voluntary membership?
    They are still lawyers.
    One of the biggest problems, Dean, is that the bad apples never get dealt with. Its the same with the medical profession.
    If I could just once see a crooked lawyer or a quack doctor get dealt with and the issue out in public, i might not have such a jaded view.

  14. Well If they do not want him tried in the US, then I suggest he be tried in Afgan where the “alleged offense occured” is that not the way it normally works. If you are accused of breaking a law in Italy they do not fly you to Canada to have the trial.

  15. Geez, I can see another “unfair generalizations” argument arising over this one, just like the posts about the Jamaicans.
    Speaking in general terms, lawyers, as a whole, are rats. Speaking in less “intellectually-lazy” terms, some lawyers are are good, some are rats and some are f***ing rats.
    Defense lawyers should be permitted to launch and run an aggressive compaign to defend the rights of their clients WITHIN THE LIMITS OF THE LAW, but as soon as they start concocting fairy tales as a defense, THE LAWYERS SHOULD BE CHARGED with some sort of crime. I can’t count how many news stories I have read with lawyers using obvious fairy tales as their clients’ defense…lying bast***s.

  16. Are lawyers rats? The Macleans article purports as much. And many of us have anecdotal evidence to the same. But Jonathon Kay in Monday’s Post offers a different viewpoint that’s equally valid. I won’t dispense it here but in essence the very nature of the self-regulated industry is faulty: ie, expected billings of 40 hours a week actually means 60 or more hours of work, endlessly connected to PDAs, deadlines etc. And it’s all driven by those who were once juniors themselves.
    Anyway, food for thought.

  17. Lawyers thrive on the confusion and liabilities of badly crafted laws their brothers in legislating produce.
    Lawyers belong to a closed society which is responsible for complicating the law to a point no layman can understand it. In this regard they have made a monopoly of the justice system and nullified public oversight and involvement in it.
    A bar lawyer sits in judgement of a defendant trapped by uninterrupted law while two other bar society layers put on a show for him with pro and con interpretations of the undefined law another group of lawyers crafted and foisted on the public…..all from the same closed society accountable only to its own standards….never was there a conflict of interest like this instilled as “justice”…more like “JUST- US”

  18. Phil, there may be some validity to that post by Jonathan Kay, but your summary that the:
    “…self-regulated industry is faulty: ie, expected billings of 40 hours a week actually means 60 or more hours of work, endlessly connected to PDAs, deadlines etc. And it’s all driven by those who were once juniors themselves…”
    applies equally well to engineering firms (and other professions)…yet engineers are not viewed with the same disdain (and I would suggest for very good reasons). There’s much more to it that that. I believe that (particularly defense and tax) lawyers are encouraged to lie and exaggerate and concoct fictions to create the “shadow of a doubt”. Personally, I don’t much care for liars.

  19. Vitruvius,
    Even journalists have a handful of good people. But taken as a whole, they’re a scummy bunch of vermin.
    Ditto Lawyers.
    Ditto my own profession. The investment industry is full of rats and they infest every corner of Bay Street and the investment sections of every city in Canada. That doesn’t mean there aren’t good people in it. Just that they’re the minority.

  20. Some are rats, some are rat’s asses, others just asses.
    Someone coined the phrase, “the law is an ass”, where did that perception come form?
    It’s like so many other professions with different applications. They used to command respect as pillars of our communities, many still are but a lot has been lost in that regard with our Charter a la Turdeau. It doesn’t help matters with the stacked Lefty deck in the Supreme Court. A lot of trust has been lost in our entire legal system.

  21. The thing about lawyers is that everybody hates them and despises them because they are sneaky, greedy and etc….But when you are in a legal jam and you need a lawyer, you want the dirtiest, sneakiest etc one you can find.

  22. My experience of lawyers – is that they are, on the whole, rats. I don’t think it’s because they are ‘tarred with our sins’, as vitruvius suggested – though I see his point. Nor is it about money. I think this is due to the structure of the profession.
    Lawyers have become removed from reality. They aren’t concerned with truth. Only with winning their case. (Which is why they are so heavily aligned with the similar-thinking Liberal Party – heh).
    This fact – that they and their actions have been removed from the level of real life and flung up onto an ‘unreal level’ – a level without accountability, without contact with the real world shuffling below them..means that there are no ‘real-life standards’ by which they operate. Their standards are completely different. Their standards are – winning. And how they achieve that win is semantic, ie, it’s based around words rather than reality.
    So- they aren’t interested in the things we, on that lower level, are interested in.
    We are interested in truth. Did X shoot so and so? The lawyer isn’t interested; he is only interested in convincing you that no such reality exists. Or if X did shoot, then, the cause of that shooting wasn’t X, but was society..which didn’t provide him with a proper home and basketball court and….
    Did X steal money from the taxpayer? The lawyer isn’t interested; he is only interested in muddying the issue so that you no longer know what the terms ‘steal’ or ‘taxpayer’ means.
    We are interested in justice. If you were street racing, were drunk, were driving with a suspended license – we want this acknowledged and you put in jail. The lawyer isn’t interested in any justice; he wants to confuse the issue, redefine the issue – and get his client off without accountability.
    This fact – that lawyers have, in their daily work agendas, become completely removed from any contact, any obligations to actual truth and justice – and live within a secondary level of pure semantics – has corrupted their profession.
    And that’s why we hate them. Their disdain for real life, for actual truth and actual justice.

  23. Lawyers, and only lawyers – be they writing law, arguing law or interpreting law – have been instrumental in the separation of “law” and “justice”.
    There may be honest and dedicated lawyers out there – but the rats rule, and we are living with the consequences.

  24. I’ve worked with many lawyers over the last 37 years that’s I’ve spent in the financial services industry. Some are honest, some are not, some are just plain brilliant at manipulating the rules and regulations to benefit themselves. Some will exploit every angle – skirt the edges – for personal gain. I have to say that, knowing what I know, there are more that I would not do business with. Lawyers not only work with the law but they also make law.
    Tony Merchant’s face on the front Page of the Leader Post last week defending his profession is alot like Colonel Sanders sitting on the Chicken Defense Board. What a joke having him as a spokesman for lawyers doing more good in society than your banker. Quite frankly, when I retire, the thing I will miss the least is working with lawyers. The fees they charge are, in many cases, obscene. Judge Gomery is absolutely correct when he says that fees are much too high and this is putting access to the legal system out of reach for many. It is pure and utter greed.

  25. Allan’s on to something here—the very thing I wanted to say about lawyers: as a PROFESSION, these Canadians have done great harm to our country. Via the Charter, whose architect was that weasel and lawyer, Trudeau, they turned Canada from a free and proud Dominion to a snivelling, juvenile, irresponsible, nanny state.
    NB: Most of our politicians and ALL of our judges are lawyers. (One of the good things about the Conservative government is that it’s composed of fewer lawyers—I think: can someone confirm?—than the succession of Liberal governments, which have emasculated both the people and institutions of this country.)
    Lawyers have also used the Charter to successfully defend some of the least defensible and most irresponsible Canadian offenders. Accountability? No way: the Charter is only about “rights”—unearned rights, unmoored from their opposite responsibilities. Very bad news.
    As a GROUP, Canadian lawyers, both past and present, have a lot to answer for.
    (Disclaimer: Some of my family and best friends are lawyers. Some are actually working to expose and change the rot of Canada’s Charter culture: not a nice job, but someone’s got to do it!)

  26. If the engineering society operated like the bar association, most public structures would collapse to rubble from the conflicts of interest between their design and construction and inspection and certification authorities.

  27. The biggest problem with lawyers is that their services are generally out of reach for most middle class people. Poor people have legal aid. Rich people can afford their services. But, can the average person making $25/hr afford the services of someone charging $300/hr?
    By inserting themselves into government, lawyers have made their services essential. Then they charge retarded amounts for their services.
    And don’t give me crap about cost of education, cost of running an office, etc. As an engineer I had to go to school as well. As a self employed consultant, I understand the cost of running a business. And at the end of the day, I charge multinational oil and gas companies less for my services than a lawyer charges a single mom working at Tim Horton’s.
    Ya lawyers are rats. They’re doucebags too!

  28. If society is an organism then justice industry is the cancer that is slowly killing the organism, especially in the US, tough the Canadian cancer is following the leader.
    Take the case of a drywall applicator in the nearby US city, the guy can’t do the work anymore because he has to come up with 2 million dollars liability insurance. Are you kidding me? How can a working person afford that?

  29. For a really disgusting example of rat’s ass legals look to the Conrad Black trial. A real fine example of a legalized Lynch Mob. If they can’t get him on most of the charges they’re prepared to invent a new on.
    They want him stripped of all his money and all his dignity, making his entire life all for naught and ensuring his life will end in jail.
    To act in such a venal manner in the name of justice, those prosecutors have no heart or soul, it’s all showboating and winning.
    They are lower than rat’s asses, they’re snakes.

  30. What sickens me is the staggering millions that are paid to lawyers for virtually nothing. Over $400 million was spent for lawyers in the softwood lumber talks over the years and there was no deal until Harper quickly settled it. The millions spent on the Gomery inquiry for what, maybe 3 people charged. The middle class can not afford to use lawyers as they charge too much. My cousin had a fully documented fraud case against her former store manager, the defence lawyer delayed and remanded the case over two years then had the gall to tell the judge that the case was taking too long and his client was suffering emotionally, the judge agreed and dismissed the case, my cousin lost over $200k and her former manager laughed in her face as she walked out. Lawyers lie and cheat, yah think.
    Engineers build things, doctors save lives, lawyers shuffle paper to meet the convoluted laws and rules their fellow lawyers designed in the first place! A former chief justice stated that prior to the lawyer’s wet dream, the Rights and Freedom Act, it took on average 7 days to try a murder trial whereas today it takes 7 months, billable hours through the roof.

  31. After a spate of killings in Calgary and a retiring chief, the Herald ran an article about how the City Police must modify its vision.
    Really! After being cut back some 150 officers and and dealing with a ballooning population, to much of which consists of the “bad guys”, just how is this suppose to happen.
    The real change in vision has to occur with those in the Judiciary, the IRB adjudicators, and the panelists on the Human Rights Commissions.
    Far to often they have been, and continue to be, blatant political patronage appointments and survive by towing the Extreme Political Correctness philosophy that has made Canada a nation governed by minority rule.
    These people are, for the most part faceless, have little if any accountability for their decisions, and live in their own small but very powerful politically correct world. These people are the ones who have been and are continuing to set the rules – not the police and not the lawyers who have to plead before them.
    To label lawyers at large for what many of them, as well as us, have inherited and have to work within hardly seems reasonable.

  32. If I was accused of some crime, I’d certainly want the benefit of a trial before being thrown in prison for five years. I expect the same for Khadr, although in his case I’d certainly hope that he’d be found guilty of terrorist activities and his freedom removed.
    Which would be perfectly acceptable, AFTER a trial. But to give governments the power to permanently detain people without trials or being accountable is a nasty and dangerous thing.

  33. It’s not the lawyers, it’s the system that encourages perversion of justice.
    Things like precedent. Some judge makes a ruling, right or wrong, and other cases are judged by that ruling. Not the law. In effect, the law is changed to be whatever interpretation suits the bias of some judge.
    As these judgements based on precedent compound over the years, the standard of judgement “evolves” to the point it bears little relation to the written law.

  34. Zilla,
    We wouldn’t have to find a scummy lawyer if all the other lawyers, judges and politician (lawyers all) have stacked the system and designed the system for their benifit. They have made the system around their needs and ensured their own indespensibility. The law didn’t need to be a nit-picky, overly dogmatic system based more on proceedure, technicalities and gramatical extremism. The idea of winning or losing a case not on fact but on a missing period or comma is assinine. Lawyers did that.
    The accounting profession is not that much different except that they had to get their lawyer/politician friends to stack the system for them instead of doing it themselves.
    Neither system needs to be so complicated that lawyers and bean-counters are necessary. It is so to benefit the insiders and over-billers who donate huge money, time and power to the politican/lawyers in government. The system will never be rationalized due to their interests.

  35. Kate…your occupational survey counted 14 lawyers/legal assistants. Wonder how many have commented here.
    I agree with ol hoss. It is no longer a ‘justice system’.It is a game.Law abiding citizens lose.

  36. In British legal tradition it was deemed that if a law was written it must be written so as to be clearly understood by all….the people could not be expected to abide by any law which they did not fully and clearly understand.
    This is a very fair and civilly just premise for the rule of law.
    By contrast, what have we today is a mutated mix of Napoleonic code law and Roman administrative law wheich were only intended to be understod and administered by the ruling class…we have an income tax act that is 800 plus pages deep…we have a civilian gun control law wich invilves 37 pages of statute and 40 pages of regulations and 125 pages of administrative regulation…we have laws regulating commerce from 3 levels of government which comprise hundreds of volumes of legal regulatory text….lawyers specialize in narrow sections of law or particular statutes because it is impossible even for even them to have a general knowledge of the law…it is too vast and convoluted and undefined and nebulous.
    The end result is the citizen is hostage to a society of law which puts a price tag on receiving justice….in such a legal morass beyond the ability of the average citizen to comprehend or file actions or respond to actions, the law society has a monopoly on selling justice.
    As an earlier post eluded to; the cost of receiving justice in this modern legal morass is beyond the means of most people…..so you can see “rights” are limited to those who can afford access to the courts. Justice is financially prohibitive to most….and I blame this on the law society and their members in practice, on the bench and in legislating bodies.
    They have complicated the law, created a monopoly of justice and priced this justice beyond the reach of the average citizen.

  37. Their RATS,VULTURES,SHARKS,SLUGS,SNAKES,HYENAS,JACKCALS, and all sorts of lowly lifeforms especialy DENEBIAN SLIME DEVILS and REGULAN BLOOD WORMS

  38. Sean,
    In war past, would you be in favour of releasing the prisoners before the war ended? Of course not. So if you think he’s a legit soldier, no release is needed.
    Kadr has had his day in court delayed by lawyers and procedural pickering. Until the lawyers and judges fight out which trial and on what basis and where it will all occur, justice is delayed. That’s the law’s fault. Kadr is going to be tried in court as an illegal combatant engaged in murder (read: war criminal.) He isn’t charged with fighting in a war but being an illegal combatant feigning death and throwing a grenade on a medic after the battle in violation of the rules of war. The Nuremberg trials were not held in a day, neither will Kadr’s. The difference between then and now is the political bias of the media and their 24 hour per day news cycle. In today’s 24/7 world, no one has any patience at all.
    Keep in mind that long trials for hard cases is not uncommon here either. Witness the Bre-X trial that just ended – 10 years or so later.

  39. W.R.T. Kadhr and other Canadians charged with crimes in countries OUTSIDE of Canada:
    Why does everyone expect to be held to Canadian justice standards in these cases? If you’re dumb enough to traffic drugs in a country that has the death penalty for drug trafficing… well that’s your stupid choice.
    If you’re dumb enough to go to a country to fight Americans and get caught… well that’s your stupid choice.
    Kadhr should NOT be returned to Canada because he didn’t commit his crime in Canada. He committed a crime in Afganistan, against the American Army. I think he should be thanking his lucky stars to have been captured and brought to Gitmo. I can think of a lot worse fates that could have befallen a terrorist/enemy combatant in a foreign war zone.

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