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.

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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.