THE ADVOCATE 459
VOL. 79 PART 3 MAY 2021
of the general practitioner, especially the general practice solicitor. The
need to preserve the generalist is critical in the smaller cities and towns. If
the experience of the medical profession is anything to go by, the smaller
centres will not be able to attract legal or medical specialists. If the specialists
flourish in the big cities and the general practitioners decline everywhere,
who will look after the needs of ordinary people and their small
businesses? Again, the experience of doctors may provide an answer. The
once-vanishing “family practitioner” has made a comeback “in a health-care
system in which primary-care physicians increasingly act as gatekeepers to
other services”24 Perhaps the general practice solicitor could survive if the
public came to value their role as “gatekeeper” to legal (and other) specialist
advisors.
To counter the somewhat negative portrayal of corporate lawyers in the
media, this suggestion by a United States author may have application:
The American corporate bar played a decisive role in the development of
our society … Only lawyers had in the post-Civil War period the particular
gift for “relational thinking” adequate for the framing of corporate
charters, security issues, and all the rest; the particular courage to work
ahead of the cases and statutes in order to give powers to corporations
which had never been tested … in court; the particular tradition to give
body to such decisive inventions as the fiction of the corporation as a
“person”. This extraordinary achievement has not … made heroes of the
bar—perhaps … because the anonymity of office work—“paper work”—
leads to its relative disregard.25
Whatever doubts one may have as to the validity of that particular claim,
it does point out the need for solicitors to think in a positive way about the
contributions they have made to society and about the worth of their
work—and then to promote awareness of this among the public. Perhaps we
might even see the creation of the solicitor’s equivalent to Rumpole!
Historically, the governing bodies of professions have tried to protect the
interests of their members while at the same time protecting the public
from the misdeeds of their more errant members. Increasingly Law Societies
have decided to make protection of the public their first priority. This
has resulted in the emergence of the Canadian Bar Association as the main
lobby organization for lawyers. The continued expansion of this role is
essential for the future of the solicitors’ side of the profession.
In its diligent pursuit of the protection of the public, the Law Society
appears to be ahead of the governing bodies of other professions. Instead of
seeing this as a cause for resentment, lawyers should see it as potentially
giving the legal profession a big advantage over its competitors. If there
were better awareness of the full extent of the protection (and insurance
coverage) provided by the Law Society, consumers and corporations might