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Foreword

Re: article below, “Une juge en colère” (An Angry Judge)

Begin this, find the quote about the querulents costing the taxpayers; and then go to this: the real truth is that big corporations are living their decade-long legal sagas off the backs of the taxpayers. When has a divorce file taken a decade to go through court? Can the expenses of a nasty divorce case possibly exceed the decade-long expenses of a nasty corporate battle between Corporate Godzilla and Corporate King Kong?

Quebec Court of Appeal Judge says the big corporations are the ones eating up the taxpayers’
money.

Big corporations with Limitless Funds are the Uncontested Champions of Court Warfare

Add a bi-color pic of Godzilla and king Kong or something like that, battling over the Palais de Justice de Montreal.

Part of a good intro here would be the story of the labor lawyer who told me the meter is running, shut up, it pays your rent. He was filing a frivolous appeal on behalf of his client, in order to BILL him for it. Judge Otis discounts the influence behind the scenes of a swelling population of lawyers with a growing need to bill in order to stay employed.

So, the first question is, in all these extended corporate court battles, are the lawyers running up the appeals in order to pad their bills? The second question is, if the big corporations indeed have “limitless” funds, why not make them pay for their own court time, as well as for their own lawyers? Why foist the bill for corporate legal warfare onto the middle-class taxpayer?

And my third question is, if the big corporations can sue and be sued for years on end, how come no one’s declaring them crazy? Perhaps because they have money, and would kick your ass if you tried? So that declarations of madness must be reserved for the poor, who can’t afford to fight back, and for whom lawyers have no sympathy since the self-represented poor eat up court time that could be used for billing.

Finally, an observation about the costs of Legal Aid (maybe put this in other article on 7000 lawyerless litigants. It is an unpublished fact that certain lawyers with connections inside Legal Aid, have been double and triple-dipping into the fund. One criminal lawyer who was very popular with the judges because of his sense of humor and his personality, behind the scenes verbally brutalized his Legal Aid clients to force them downtown to sign the same legal aid papers again and again, while falsely accusing his clients of having not signed the papers at all. The criminal lawyer in question had a female colleague from the Legal Aid department, whom he would meet over cocktails. Madam was thereafter willing to crank out two and even three distinct sets of Legal Aid forms for each of this man’s clients. Each time a new set of forms was signed, the old set of forms went to Accounting, to issue the criminal lawyer’s cheque… i.e., the full Legal Aid fee for handling an entire case, while the case had not yet been finished. Therefore, two or three times in the course of a Legal Aid case, that criminal lawyer was paid for the same case, in full, two or three times over! If Legal Aid had to be cut back, could this be one reason: Lawyers using and abusing it as “lawyer welfare”? And if the authorities would like the name of the lawyer, I would be happy to give it to them. Moreover, this fellow also took cash from his Legal Aid clients, which the Legal Aid law at that time forbade him from doing. A hundred bucks here, a hundred bucks there. So that Legal Aid services for some lawyers are a matter of friends inside, manipulating the system, abusing the client to get it done, and then having the client top it up with cash.

Begin this, find the quote about the querulents costing the taxpayers; and then go to this: the real truth is that big corporations are living their decade-long legal sagas off the backs of the taxpayers. When has a divorce file taken a decade to go through court? Can the expenses of a nasty divorce case possibly exceed the decade-long expenses of a nasty corporate battle between Corporate Godzilla and Corporate King Kong?

Quebec Court of Appeal Judge says the big corporations are the ones eating up the taxpayers’
money.

///// put in two columns and translate this ////

Une juge en colère
13 juillet 2007 |Brian Myles | Justice

Le système judiciaire devrait être réformé pour éviter que les affrontements entre les grandes entreprises ne s’éternisent devant les tribunaux, estime Louise Otis, juge à la Cour d’appel du Québec.

Mme Otis se demande en effet s’il est sage de permettre à de grandes institutions commerciales de s’entredéchirer en cour pendant plusieurs années compte tenu des coûts de la justice. «Lorsqu’on sait que c’est la classe moyenne, majoritairement, qui finance le système de justice, je ne peux pas m’empêcher de me poser des questions et de me demander: qu’est-ce qu’on peut faire différemment?», dit Mme Otis. «Est-ce que nos cours ont vraiment les instances spécialisées pour recevoir les “grands citoyens corporatifs” qui se battent l’un contre l’autre?», ajoute-t-elle.

Mme Otis se garde bien de donner des exemples concrets pour illustrer son propos, car elle est tenue d’observer une réserve judiciaire. Comme tout le monde, elle a pu constater que des entreprises aux moyens quasi illimités sont passées maîtres dans l’art de la contestation.

«À moins qu’il ne s’agisse de questions d’importance nationale ou de fixer l’état du droit et que ça rejaillisse sur l’ensemble de la communauté, j’ai de la difficulté à concevoir qu’un litige puisse persister entre des parties qui ne sont pas indigentes mais sont de grandes entreprises fortunées qui vont accaparer les ressources de l’État pendant des années. Je pense qu’on va devoir repenser nos méthodes», estime-t-elle.

Mme Otis lance l’idée de la conciliation à titre préventif. «Par exemple, on pourrait proposer qu’il y ait médiation obligatoire avant que les tribunaux ne soient saisis d’un grand litige», suggère-t-elle.

Le juge pourrait également obtenir la responsabilité de nommer un ou deux experts pour toute la durée d’un procès, comme c’est le cas dans certains pays scandinaves, «pour éviter qu’il y ait des litiges interminables où il y a des dizaines d’experts qui viennent à tour de rôle et qui allongent les débats pendant un an», dit-elle.

L’indignation de la juge de la Cour d’appel a des fondements juridiques. Mme Otis cite l’article 4.2 du Code de procédure civile: «Dans toute instance, les parties doivent s’assurer que les actes de procédure choisis sont, eu égard aux coûts et au temps exigés, proportionnés à la nature et à la finalité de la demande et à la complexité du litige; le juge doit faire de même à l’égard des actes de procédure qu’il autorise ou ordonne.»

«C’est un article d’une extrême importance. C’est une invitation du législateur à intégrer le critère de proportionnalité à l’intérieur de nos débats de justice, à mesurer les interventions qu’on doit faire», explique Mme Otis. Aux juges de le rappeler aux parties.