Tony Deyal, Contributor
A MAN went into a pet shop to buy a parrot. The shop owner pointed to three identical birds lined up on the perch. "How much is the one on the left?" asked the customer. 'Five hundred dollars', replied the owner. "Why is it so expensive?" the man asked. "Because it knows how to do legal research," said the owner. "What about the one in the middle? How much is that?" enquired the customer. The shop owner said the cost was one thousand dollars. 'Why so much?' asked the customer. "It looks just like the other one." The shop owner explained, "The parrot can do anything the other one can do, plus it knows how to write a brief and can speak so convincingly that it can win any case." "Wow," exclaimed the prospective purchaser. "What about the third parrot, the one on the right?" "Five thousand dollars," replied the shop owner. The customer was flabbergasted, "It must be pretty special to be worth that much. What does it do?" "To be honest," replied the shop owner. "I've never seen him do a damn thing, but the other two call him 'Senior'."
WHINE OF ASTONISHMENT
'Senior' is what lawyers in our system call 'Senior Counsel (SC)', our equivalent of what in Britain would be a QC or Queen's Counsel. Seniors are not determined, as in the public service by age, or even by merit only, but by factors still unclear to the layman and many other lawyers who toil gallantly in the vineyards of the justice system, uttering the usual whine of astonishment when ignored for elevation to Senior Counsel. It is not just the silk or the ritual of the "taking of silk" that differentiates the Senior from the Junior Counsel. It is the vast difference in fees and prestige. It is an interesting situation where persons selected by the political directorate to be the Attorney General, for instance, or the Director of Public Prosecutions, can end up Senior Counsel, and persons with considerably more seniority, service and even talent, remain Juniors all their lives.
Senior Counsel develop a strong sense of self that in lesser mortals can be deemed arrogance. A man went to an SC for help. "What are your fees?" he asked. "One hundred guineas for three questions," the SC replied. "That's pretty steep isn't it?" the man queried. "Maybe," responded the SC. "What's your third question?"
Getting silk does not automatically imply an increase in intelligence, merely one in fees. An SC was cross-examining a coroner: "Before you signed the death certificate Dr. Brown, had you taken the man's pulse?" "No," replied the coroner. "Did you listen for a heart beat?" pressed the SC. "No," confessed the coroner. Voice rising dramatically, and pausing for effect, the SC thundered, "Did you check for breathing?" to which the coroner again responded in the negative. Condescendingly the SC said meaningfully, "So when you signed the death certificate, you hadn't taken any steps to check that the man was dead, did you?" The coroner, tired of the browbeating, hit back. "Let me put it this way," he explained. "The man's brain was sitting in a jar on my desk, but for all I know he could be out there practising law as a Senior Counsel somewhere."
The problem is, perhaps because of the poor quality of all lawyers, especially Senior Counsel, the law is held in much lower regard than at any other time in history. While Senior Counsel let off esteem, the public let off steam. Tania Branigan, writing in the British paper 'The Guardian' revealed, "Almost half the public believe solicitors are arrogant, slow, incompetent and at worst plain dishonest, according to a survey. Nearly half of those questioned believed their legal representatives offered poor value for money, and a quarter thought them 'positively untrustworthy' in the ICM poll of 1,000 people. RAC Legal Services, which commissioned the survey, said lawyers were providing a second rate service." In Canada, the Ottawa Citizen published a special report entitled, "How Crooked Lawyers dodge justice." According to the story, written by Paul McKay, "201 years after the Law Society of Upper Canada was mandated to sniff out unscrupulous lawyers and guard the interests and money of unsuspecting clients, the self-governing body of Ontario's 27,000 lawyers is proving to be a watchdog with a muffled bark and no bite."
The five-month Citizen probe "shed light on a startling string of misconduct, theft and fraud cases involving Ontario lawyers". According to McKay, "The Law Society Act reflects a historic arrangement in Ontario that has given the legal profession as a fully self-regulating profession a parallel system of justice in which lawyers accused of wrongdoing face a panel of peers, and where no criminal findings are ever made. The Citizen study shows this often amounts to a privileged system of justice. It allows crooked lawyers to be judged by other lawyers, not 12 citizens on a jury panel. It allows suspected lawyers full constitutional and legal rights to defence, but gives their victims few rights to obtain documents, cross-examine the lawyer, or even testify For victimised clients, there is often little sense of justice."
NUMEROUS EXAMPLES
There are numerous examples of abuse, especially where Senior Counsel are concerned since they are tried by their juniors who face considerable social and professional pressure, even blacklisting, for finding against their 'Seniors'. I am now in the middle of one such situation and because of this if you ask me, "If you were stranded on a desert island with Hitler, Saddam Hussein and a Senior Counsel and you had a gun with only two bullets, what would you do?" My answer would be, 'Shoot the SC twice'.
Tony Deyal was last seen asking "How do you get an SC out of a tree?" Cut the rope. "What do you have if three SCs up to their necks in sand?" Not enough sand. "How do you keep an SC from drowning?" Take your foot off his head.
