A truck driver says he has been prosecuted twice – first by his own lawyer, who lied and fabricated documents, then by the law firm’s insurer, who refused to compensate him because the same lawyer did not follow his rules.
Dale Rindero wanted to sue his former employer, believing he had been unfairly fired.
He was sure there was a good case, as the Alberta Employment Standards and Employment Insurance regulators had already sided with him.
But Rindero missed the two-year period to file a lawsuit for wrongful dismissal because his lawyer lied and did not do the necessary work.
Kevan Peterson lied about suing and fabricated complex documents for a $ 22,000 deal he said he was negotiating with Rindero’s former employer, according to Alberta law firm.
“He had done nothing but lie to me. “When he finally admitted that he had done nothing with the courts, he just disappeared,” Rindero told Go Public from his new home in Arberfield, Sask. He used to live in Boniville, Alta.
Rindero turned to the law firm’s insurance company, the Alberta Lawyers’ Compensation Association (ALIA), to sue for the money he thought he had lost because his case never went to court.
But the insurer refused to consider the lawsuit – not because Rindero did something wrong, but because Peterson violated the insurer’s rules. So that canceled his coverage.
“I don’t understand,” Rindero said of the ALIA decision. “I guess they’re there for a purpose, but I have no idea what that is.”
Experts say there is a loophole in the system – which aims to protect Canadians from bad lawyers – which leaves people like Rindero holding the bag.
Instead of essentially a monopoly on legal services, legal expert Robert Harvey says lawyers are required to have insurance through their provincial law firms to protect and compensate clients when good lawyers make mistakes or bad ones intentionally harm them. customers.
“The price of this monopoly is protection [the public]and they don’t, ”said Harvey, a lawyer and former court at the Alberta Law Firm, where he helped with regulatory issues and more.
Dale Rindero says he has been denied justice twice – once by a bad lawyer, then by insurance to protect Canadians from troubled lawyers. (Don Somers / CBC)
He says clients who have been wronged can easily be denied claims if their lawyer violates the insurer’s rules.
And those rules can be very specific, he says, ranging from refusing to cooperate with legal society investigations to refusing to report potential complaints to the public before they even happen.
ALIA will not say which rules Peterson broke. Rindero says he was told he refused to cooperate with the law firm’s investigation against him.
“We finally lost our house”
When Rindero was looking for a lawyer, the law firm referred him to its referral service, where he found Peterson.
The website showed that Peterson was in good condition without any problems. That changed after Rindero hired him in March 2016, but no one at the law firm warned Rindero.
He only found out when he called to complain about Peterson in June 2019, and he was told that the man he thought was still his lawyer had been removed five months earlier.
Rindero says the bank seized his home in Alberta after he was unable to handle mortgage payments due to his problems with his lawyer, Kevan Peterson. (Dale Rindero)
“I was completely speechless,” Rindero said. “They need to let you know when your lawyer is removed.
The law firm asked the court to appoint a trustee to inform clients when a lawyer was in trouble, but in Peterson’s case this did not happen for several months because the public believed he had no active records, according to Elizabeth J. Osler, CEO and CEO of the company.
Peterson’s removal was extended for another 13 months on January 25, 2021, after the law firm’s hearing committee found him guilty of 21 violations of his code of conduct involving six clients, including Rinder. These violations include misconduct, failure to appear in court, dishonesty, forging a false document, practicing law while removed, and others.
He was ordered to pay $ 12,574 to cover the costs of the hearing, but the law firm was not allowed to use the money to pay for the restitution of unjust clients.
For four months after he was fired, Rindero struggled to find work, and when he did, it was temporary manual labor, doing part of what he did before – about $ 120,000 a year, plus benefits.
Lack of work and compensation hit him hard, he said.
“It had a huge, huge impact,” he said. “We were trying to keep up with the bills [but] I was late with the mortgage payments. We ended up losing our house. ”
He has since found another job as a truck driver, but it is only seasonal, not paid as well and no benefits.
2 types of lawyers
Most lawyers follow the rules and serve their clients well, says Trevor Farrow, a professor at Osgoode Hall in Toronto. But he says clients should not be abandoned when lawyers make mistakes or intentionally cause harm.
Those who are disciplined by law firms fall into two categories, he says: those who make mistakes and admit them, and fraudulent lawyers whose wrongdoing leads to clients taking the hit.
Farrow says insurers often compensate customers for the former, while the latter may fail.
“These are much rarer cases where there is no mistake. This is someone who does not play by the rules and they have withdrawn,” he said.
Osgoode law professor Trevor Farrow says clients should not be left in their purses when lawyers become fraudsters. (Submitted by Trevor Farrow)
Farrow says that while all Canadian law firms that regulate the legal profession require lawyers to have insurance, many also have a separate compensation fund for disadvantaged clients.
The problem is that these remedies are often limited and cover only specific types of wrongdoing.
For example, the BC fund only compensates for the theft of money or other property, and the Alberta fund only covers cases involving misappropriation of funds.
“[Rindero’s] “It’s one of those cases that I think is right in the middle of two different sets of regimes designed to protect society … and when those two regimes don’t line up, customers are left holding the bag,” Farrow said.
Both he and Harvey say Rindero should have been compensated.
The Alberta Law Firm, which has an obligation to protect the public under the Provincial Legal Profession Act, owns ALIA, but the two largely operate independently.
Peterson was removed from the Alberta Law Firm on January 25, 2021, after pleading guilty to 21 citations, including dishonesty. (Alberta Law Firm)
Go Public asked ALIA if this obligation applies to its own work, but it did not answer this or other questions, including whether it is fair to refuse compensation to clients when their lawyer breaks the rules, and whether the ALIA system unfairly punishes people. with the bad luck of being connected to a troubled lawyer.
Instead, in a general statement, an ALIA spokesman said: “In some cases, payment of damages is not possible because the claimant or subscriber has not met the necessary criteria under the professional liability policy.”
Harvey says the public needs to question the lack of responses from an insurer who must be held accountable for its decisions.
“It’s becoming a kind of closed club of insiders, and the public doesn’t really understand the limitations, the problems, because the insiders like it the way it is,” he said.
Rindero does not hope that ALIA will help him. He hired a new lawyer and filed a lawsuit against Peterson.
“I used to trust people to keep their word,” Rindero said. “I do not know if I can do that anymore. I tell people to keep your back, be careful, because you have no right to defend yourself if you hire a bad lawyer.
Peterson’s removal was due to end on February 25, but the law firm’s website indicates that he is still barred from practicing law. Lawyers must apply for reinstatement, and those applications are confidential, the law firm said.
Go Public tried to contact Peterson for comment, but received no response.
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