Every year, young lawyers are admonished by senior lawyers not to steal their clients’ money. It seems that every year, senior lawyers are accused of stealing their client’s money, and some are charged, arrested, convicted and imprisoned. This cycle continues to this day.
So far, nothing that the Bar Association has tried has changed this cycle of behaviour. Various groups have advanced solutions that will also not likely change this cycle. They thought that reciting the lawyer’s code of ethics to young lawyers and admonishing them not to steal would result in less stealing by senior lawyers.
ASSUME ALL LAWYERS ARE THIEVES
We seem blind to the notion that simply telling thieves not to steal and expecting them not to is lunatically absurd. Why would anyone think that such admonitions would work with lawyers who have a tendency to steal in ways more creative than a typical thief?
There seem to be two effective solutions of solving this national problem, and both must assume that all lawyers are thieves. Clearly most of them are not. However, given the consequences of their Clients losing their life-savings, it would be prudent to make this assumption when giving them this money – and foolish not to.
SOLUTIONS
The first solution is to adequately maintain and use the Bar Association’s Compensation Fund for its intended purpose, which is to reimburse Clients of their dishonest members. The Bar Association’s response to the desperate cries of victims of their members should not be to spend more money on lawyers to argue their case in court, but to inform them about the Compensation Fund and reimburse them accordingly.
The second solution is for Clients to keep their money so that it cannot be stolen by lawyers. Instead, they should let banks take the financial risks by obtaining a mortgage and let the banks negotiate with the lawyers and obtain the title deeds to the purchased property.
PEACE OF MIND
Once the transaction of money for title deeds is completed, the Client should pay the bank and get the deeds. There will be bank fees, but they are simply the costs of letting them manage the financial risks.
This is a win-win-win situation for everyone. The Clients win by having the peace of mind that they have not followed the many unfortunate clients who trusted dishonest lawyers with their life savings. The lawyers who have a tendency to steal win by having a bank-managed system that removes the opportunities to steal. The Barbados Bar Association wins because it should lead to less of their members going to prison for theft and money laundering.
KEEPING STOLEN MONEY
The Bar Association is evidently ineffective in preventing thefts by their members. They give the public false hopes that they provide meaningful oversight and that their Disciplinary Committee can expeditiously resolve thefts done by their members. Their actions do not seem to benefit the Clients of their dishonest members, but only lawyers.
When the Bar Association disbars lawyers, then those disbarred lawyers cannot earn fees from the discipline in which they were trained. Therefore, they have less incentive to repay the money and more incentive to hide and live off of the stolen funds. Meanwhile, the lawyers who are not disbarred get an opportunity to increase their share of the legal services market.
THE ROOT CAUSE OF THE PROBLEM
Despite these effective solutions being known, it is foreseen that people will continue to put their money at risk by giving it directly to lawyers. They will likely do this because they will continue to make the assumption that their lawyers are honest.
Clients who, for decades, cannot recover the money they gave to dishonest lawyers because of the inefficiency of the judicial system, which happens to be managed by lawyers and harshly criticised by the Caribbean Court of Justice, may eventually realise that trusting their lawyers was a fatal assumption – and the root cause of their problems.
The blogmaster invites you to join and add value to the discussion.