Form Fillers: Residential school students say they’ve been hurt by law firm
To get into the IAP process, you must fill out a 21-page application form and then prepare for a hearing where adjudicators will question you to ensure your claims are legitimate. The IAP Secretariat encourages former students to retain a lawyer to help them with this complex process.
APTN National News
To get into the IAP process, you must fill out a 21-page application form and then prepare for a hearing where adjudicators will question you to ensure your claims are legitimate. The IAP Secretariat encourages former students to retain a lawyer to help them with this complex process.
Blott and Company make extensive use of non-lawyer form fillers. But other law firms see that as the wrong approach.
Lawyer Jon Faulds is the spokesperson for the national consortium of law firms that were involved in the original class action lawsuits.
“Most of the consortium firms don’t have any relationship with form fillers,” he said. “I think from the perspective of most of the national consortium firms, the difficulty with form fillers is the so-called form is an extremely important part of the process which winds up before the adjudicator and against which the client’s evidence gets measured.
“In other words, ‘[the adjudicator will ask] is the evidence they’re saying to me now consistent with what’s in the form.’ And form fillers who are not lawyers, who are not familiar with the entire process and sensitive to its implications, just may not fill out these application forms with the degree of exactness and precision and care that’s required because they’re not attuned to how significant that form is, not just in getting your claim filed but in actually proving your claim,” Faulds added.
Calgary lawyer Vaughn Marshall, whose firm also represents IAP clients, agrees.
“The form is a critically important part. And it is my opinion, and I think this needs to be expressed somewhere, that only a lawyer should be taking the application from the client. It’s the lawyers that should be doing that job; it’s the lawyers that should be guiding the clients through it and it’s the lawyers that should be doing the final form,” he said.
Some of the IAP claimants signed up by the form filling company associated with Blott and Company were found on reserves in several provinces. Others were found in urban settings: soup kitchens, homeless shelters, Friendship Centres, living on the streets, anywhere where those with lives bent or broken by the residential schools can be found.
The settlement agreement itself came about after lawyers representing two large class action lawsuits against the federal government were successful in getting those lawsuits certified by a court. The government and the churches then knew there was the strong possibility of a large compensation award and chose to sit down with plaintiff lawyers and the Assembly of First Nations and negotiate a compensation deal.
Under the terms of the settlement agreement, Canada pays an amount equal to 15 per cent of IAP compensation awards to the lawyers to cover legal fees. The government also pays for disbursements, costs the lawyers incur as they process the file.
The settlement agreement also allows lawyers to charge the client an additional 15 per cent if the cases are more complicated than usual. Those additional fees are subject to a review for “fairness and reasonableness” by the adjudicator.
With 29,000 potential clients and average settlements just over $100,000, there’s $2.9 billion dollars at stake for compensation, with legal fees that could total as much as $870 million, if every firm charged the additional 15 per cent on every case.
Daniel Ish, the IAP Chief Adjudicator, told us that the Blott and Company law firm handles 3,000 IAP files. It was stated online that the goal was to reach 10,000 clients, more than one-third of all the cases. Ten thousand clients with average legal fees of $30,000 would produce $300 million for the firm.
It’s a long established tradition in the legal profession in Canada that lawyers shouldn’t “beat the bushes” for clients. It’s only a relatively recent development that lawyers are even allowed to advertise their services. So in order to maintain the traditional view of the profession, there needs to be some space between the law firms and form fillers who do “beat the bushes” for clients.
Legal experts told APTN Investigates that the prohibition on “ambulance chasing” lawyers is based on the idea that the lawyer must not put his or her own financial interests ahead of the clients’ interests. Lawyers who have done that have been disciplined, even disbarred.
