Meeting the Man Behind “Lawyers are Rats”

After gaining a hard-earned acceptance to law school, there’s nothing like walking into your first day and having your future existence branded as being on a par with that of malign, dirty rodents.

Last summer, negative public perceptions of the legal profession were amplified by the release of the book Lawyers Gone Bad: Sex, Money and Madness in Canada’s Legal Profession and its accompanying Maclean’s article Lawyers Are Rats. Students at the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Law invited the lawyer credited for these works — retired law professor and ex-Bay Street partner Philip Slayton.

Mr. Slayton’s preamble to the talk, akin to the statement on the first page of his book, was that he did not believe that his book’s contents are representative of the legal profession. Instead, his compilation was meant to be an “intriguing and interesting collection of stories about human folly”, about lawyers in the face of moral quandaries.

But no page in his book unnerved members of the legal world more than his interview with Maclean’s magazine. Having arrived at newsstands with its sensational blanket title, the article roused an outraged Canadian legal community. While Mr. Slayton denied responsibility for the title, he admitted to being satisfied with it — “who’s actually going read an article with a title ‘A Small, Minute Subset of Lawyers Are Rats’?”.

The article has been since criticized by the Canadian Bar Association:

By cherry-picking the worst cases of lawyer misconduct, the article has tarnished the reputation of thousands of professionals who are honest, hard-working, and community-minded people.

Former CBA President J. Parker MacCarthy, Q.C. underscored what is of focal concern:

The unspoken assumption that lies behind the cover and article: that you can say anything you want about lawyers — no matter how unfair, cruel, or false — and you’ll be rewarded… Lawyers are one of the last groups in this country that people feel they can publicly insult with impunity.

The Breeding Ground?
Past the barrage of criticisms, Mr. Slayton emphasized three problems inherent in the Canadian legal profession which underlie the occasional “human follies” of some lawyers:

    1. the value-free culture of the legal profession where there is an inability to pass judgments of morality on clients
    2. the self-governing structure which leaves it to lawyers, and no other entity, to discipline other lawyers
    3. the legal system’s poor regard for access to justice and the omnipresent pre-occupation of billable hours which diminish the motivation to work on a low-cost or pro-bono basis

The duality of student opinion at the talk mirrored the Slayton-CBA tension: a fair number responded to his views with much concurrence — self-identified closeted law students (you know, the ones who have become too ashamed to own up to their legal affiliation in front the rest of the world) expressed concern that Lawyers are Rats would be a self-fulfilling career prophecy for most of their peers, if not for themselves.

The others, like many in the legal community, recognized that while Mr. Slayton’s message was important and warranted attention, his medium was borderline reprehensible. And no one’s giving him a run for his money – no one ever writes about lawyers gone good.

– – –
The Slayton Talk was part of a Speaker Series held by Ottawa Law Students Aren’t Rats (OLSAR), a UofO-based community service organization created to reverse the perception of lawyers which Slayton’s book and article have left in the public eye.

3 Comments on "Meeting the Man Behind “Lawyers are Rats”"

  1. Gail – as a lawyer who graduated from U.B.C. some 23 years ago, I can tell you that his thoughts are far from representative.

    For example, I, and many lawyers in Canada, have undertaken an alternate form of dispute resolution called “Collaborative Practice” where we actually sign contracts preventing us from going to Court for our clients, to limit our representation to encouraging agreement.

    Particularly outside of the major centres (I’m in Lethbridge) lawyers continue to practice under the clear umbrella of ethical behavior, and I believe that the thrust of his book and the MacLeans article is, at best, deceptive and misleading.

    There are problems – but I’ll tell you one thing. The notion that lawyers should be more willing to do “pro-bono work” and be less concerned about billing is offensive in the extreme. Relative to other professions, particuly in small centres, lawyer salaries have lagged behind increases in teachers, nurses, dentists, and the notion that lawyers should shoulder the burden of facilitating access to justice is off-base. If the public feels full access to justice is a “right”, the millions of Canadians paying tax should be asked to do so, not the mere thousands of lawyers.

    Anyhow – I love the profession, I enjoy the challenge, and feel the best of our profession continues to make what we do a worthwhile and noble endeavor.

    Good luck in law school.

  2. Some lawyers abuse their power. Perhaps they feel they are above the law. When they do, the impact on their victims can be devastating. When lawyers who act as bullies and use the legal system to feed their own greed, become judges, there is little recourse to hold them accountable. Raising awareness of those who act in unethical ways helps set the benchmark for ethical practices. I would like to be part of the process of raising the standard for all lawyers and judges, but especially those in family law situations.

  3. We were victims of mortgage fraud. We continue to fight to get our personal property, removed from our home with no notice to us.
    We were not served notice of court date. We did not have a lawyer at the time, but the bank’s lawyer said we did. This lawyer has since denied the bank’s lawyers claims, saying “…never corresponded, never went on record…”, yet all information was sent to him to give to us. We were left out of the loop entirely.
    Legal: another lawyer, through his misunderstanding of RE law, gave away our home for what was owing on it.
    another lawyer, in the same law firm, attempted to correct the problem, and made us Trustees instead of owners which muddied title and entitled our home to someone else. This still has to be fixed. another lawyer listened and said pay him his retainer and he would motion to put sufficient mortgage funds in the hands of the court in order to proceed against the bank, inform the lawyers for the bank that he was representing us, and motion not to remove furniture from the home in question as more than adequate funds were available to cover the mortgage amount. 12 – 15 court dates were ignored by this lawyer, and he never did show up for a motion appearance. In the meantime our furniture was removed, no motion was ever raised, we cannot get our retainer back, and so on. This lawyer then hired another lawyer who required almost $10,000 to close the mortgage. This lawyer did not clear the title, nor did he keep us informed what was going on. We still do not have an honest accounting of what we paid, or clear title, but he told our bank that everything was ok and done…he lied.
    This is a brief and incomplete event callander of a horrible 4 years spent while my daughter (having environmental allergies) was removed from her home, everything she knew was taken including her collection of books, videos, etc….her life is now sleeping on an inflatable rubber mattress while we struggle to get back to some sort of normal life, and trying to keep her marks up in high school. (wants to be a brain surgeon)
    There is much more to this story, but we are being cut off by the Law Society, the courts, the judge who made the decision based on incorrect knowledge, and the Lands & Titles Office who said we gave our home away. From our prospective we have to believe Philip Slayton and the statement by MacLean’s…lawyers are rats. Thank you for reading this. Maybe you should talk to a 14 year old girl and her mother to really get an off the wall talk about what they have been through,,,ask about having to live in a ’93 Mazda Protege sub compact with Mother, Father, Daughter, and 2 small dogs because of being evicted with 10 minutes notice. There is a lot more to this story, and we are writing it in book format.

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