NEWSLETTER oF THE
Presidenfs M essagf!
We may not be popular but we should certainly be proud
CANADIANBAR ----------------~------------------------~--~------------
ASSOCIATION, B.C. BRANCH
In this final President's Message (my able successor, Rob Gourlay will take office at the CBA National Convention in Halifax on August 26, 1992), I decided to philosophize a little about the incredible contribution made by the legal profession to Canadian JULY/AUG. society and, having said that, 1992 the question of why lawyers are not more popular.
Volume 4 Number 5
As I have travelled around the province to local and county bar meetings, and met with groups of lawyers, I have been reminded that many lawyers find the apparent unpopularity of our profession wearing. The supposedly funny "lawyer jokes," the off-hand and thoughtless remarks or outright
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attacks by some politicians and journalists, the easy characterization of lawyers as greedy and unscrupulous do tend to grate a bit. Interestingly enough, public opinion surveys indicate that most clients like their own lawyers and believe they have received quality service. As a profession, however, as we are only too aware, lawyers do not score in popularity contests. Why is that and should we care? The reality is that very often people who come to lawyers for assistance are already troubled and in significant difficulty of one kind or another. They have been charged with a criminal offence, their marriage is on the rocks, their business is floundering, they have been injured. They are often in an emotional state and, at least in the first visit, apt to believe that the righteousness of their position is so absolutely clear that it is completely unfair to have to pay someone to advance their obviously just argument. Many of the inadequacies of the justice system caused to a great extent by inadequate funding tend to be blamed on the people the clients see most, their lawyers. And there is no doubt that the increasing costs of overhead, competent support personnel and technology do mean that lawyers' fees are, relatively speaking, perceived as expensive. Most of us would not want to have to hire ourselves and pay our rates!
Wendy Baker, Q.C. President 1991/92 In..every lawsuit there is at least one loser and in many corporate and solicitor's transactions, one party or the other feels bested. In such circumstances, many people look for someone to blame and lawyers are handy targets. And, of course, there are bad apples in every barrel and although an incredibly small minority of lawyers are incompetent or dishonest, each one taints the public perception to a great extent. But you know all of this. So in those dark hours of professional soul searching, when your spouse's second cousin had told you yet another nauseating lawyer joke, you have received an unjustified complaint from a client to the Law Society about your practice, the Provincial Government has introduced an arbitrary tax on the consumers of your services or the press has reported that some lawyer has absconded to the South Seas with a client's trust funds, what Please turn to page 2