Taken together, the Law Society of Upper Canada decisions of last year, the first vindicating Sharon Shore as a person of sufficient good character to be a lawyer and the other awarding her $91,500 for legal costs she incurred defending herself at an uncommon admissions hearing, add up to 31 pages.
The April decision of a law society appeal panel, which sets aside the costs award, is 42 pages long.
I don't know why, but that kind of says it all for me. It is when lawyers most work themselves into complex knots that they make the least sense to me. I consider it a telling, they-doth-protest-at-too-great-length sort of thing, though it may be, of course, that I am merely dopey.
The background to this is winding, but I will try for the nutshell version.
The complaint against Mrs. Shore, then a law student preparing to be called to the bar, was launched by two high-powered Toronto lawyers whose nurse clients had emerged years before on the losing side of an acrimonious coroner's inquest that probed the Oct. 22, 1998, death of Mrs. Shore's daughter Lisa at the Hospital for Sick Children.
The little girl was suffering severe pain from a previously broken leg, a non-lethal condition, but after being put on morphine, she suffered respiratory and cardiac failure due to probable complex drug interaction and died unexpectedly and unnecessarily.
Cruelly, her mother, who had stayed in her room the whole night, was on a couch nearby when doctors on their morning rounds found her and called a "code."
The coroner's jury ruled Lisa's death was a homicide, and though the finding doesn't mean what it does in the criminal courts, ultimately the nurses were also charged criminally. Those charges were dropped during a preliminary hearing, in significant measure because of something Mrs. Shore did, which left the only remaining proceeding against the nurses her aging complaint at the College of Nurses of Ontario.
There, in the fall of 2005, the nurses pleaded guilty to professional misconduct for their failure to properly assess and monitor the 10-year-old girl. They each received a reprimand and a one-month suspension, itself immediately suspended because of all the retraining the nurses had had by that point.
Within three months, in what I always interpreted as a tit-for-tat gesture - you dare complain about our clients' conduct? Fine, we'll complain about yours --lawyers Marlys Edwardh and Liz McIntyre went to the law society about Mrs. Shore, questioning her "governability" as a potential lawyer and her "fitness to practice."
There were four corners to their complaint.
Two of them concerned Mrs. Shore's exercise of her free-speech rights; these were dropped the day before the hearing was scheduled to begin. The third, which alleged she had either suppressed or misled authorities about the existence of a handwriting analysis report, was dropped on the final day of the hearing.
The last centred on Mrs. Shore's admitted failure to disclose the report of a Boston doctor who once had seen Lisa briefly, cursorily, and suggested the pain was in her head. Mrs. Shore twice threw away this document, once when she received it shortly after Lisa's death and again when she ordered all the Boston records for the then-coming trial, as she had been asked, improperly in my view, to do. (Since when do police and prosecution rely upon the family of the victim of an alleged crime to order and get their evidence for them?) Voluntarily, if late in the game, Mrs. Shore came forward to tell the prosecutor what she had done, and it was in part because of this - how her failure to disclose the report would affect her credibility as a witness - that the criminal charges against the nurses were dropped.
Never minimizing the gravity of the conduct, the law society hearing panel nonetheless found her actions, born of a grieving mother's desire to protect her child's reputation, was "an aberration in an exemplary life."
What's more, in its later decision on costs, the panel said the law society had had plenty of uncontested evidence of Mrs. Shore's stellar character before the hearing even began, and that when "the character of a student member seeking admission to the Law Society is going to be placed in the public arena," the law society had a duty to "get it right." The society hadn't done that, the panel said; thus the hearing was unwarranted, and so the unusual costs award.
Enter the appeal, launched by the law society not on the actual decision, but on the costs.
Over 42 pages, the appeal panel determined that even where the applicant has admitted misconduct and even where there is evidence of her otherwise exemplary reputation and conduct, it doesn't necessarily mean the law society "must consent to the applicant being admitted to the bar without a hearing." The hearing was deemed warranted after all, and the costs award dismissed.
Now to my mind, there was always a David and Goliath element to the entire proceeding against Mrs. Shore.
At the time, she was a chartered accountant-turned-law student on the cusp of starting her second career; Ms. Edwardh and Ms. McIntyre are prominent, experienced, award-winning and well-connected lawyers.
I think it's fair to say a complaint from such august members would have been treated seriously, and the very rarity of the admissibility hearing - Mrs. Shore's was one of only five such hearings in 2006, with none held last year - suggests that it was.
The law society held this woman to the sternest test before allowing her to be called to the bar. I can only hope it will look as hard at the conduct of various lawyers involved in the recent and now-notorious case of Richard Wills, where the public purse took almost as big a hit as did the reputation of the legal profession.
Sharon Shore, who is now working as a lawyer, says, "It's been a painful lesson to learn that the law society and the law are two very different creatures."
