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Page 6 March 7, 2016 • Law TiMes www.lawtimesnews.com COMMENT ©2016 Thomson Reuters Canada Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reprinted or stored in a retrieval system without written per- mission. The opinions expressed in articles are not necessarily those of the publisher. Information presented is compiled from sources believed to be accurate, however, the publisher assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions. Law Times disclaims any warranty as to the accuracy, com - pleteness or currency of the contents of this pub- lication and disclaims all liability in respect of the results of any action taken or not taken in reliance upon information in this publication. Publications Mail Agreement Number 40762529 • ISSN 0847-5083 Law Times is published 40 times a year by Thomson Reuters Canada Ltd. 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Management has been doing its best to correct what was sloppy office book- keeping and government computer sys- tems that didn't "talk" to each other. The problem is the department uses not one but two different computer sys- tems. One is called iCase, on which gov- ernment lawyers and paralegals enter data on their various legal cases and how much time they put in on each case. The second system is called People- Soft. It records an employee's various leaves for sickness, bereavement, holi- days, and so on. Len MacKay, a federal justice pros- ecutor in Halifax who is president of the Association of Justice Counsel, explains that since the two computers don't talk to each other, Justice Department lawyers had to enter everything twice — once in each of the department's computer sys- tems, iCase and PeopleSoft. That wasn't always being done cor- rectly, MacKay says. Maybe managers forgot to tell the law- yers to enter everything twice. Maybe the lawyers forgot. Maybe they were using the wrong codes or making mistakes with the amount of time claimed on each entry. MacKay says he has made mistakes like that — maybe about a dozen of them and he's the union president. By the time the big inves- tigation was over, about 3,700 government workers and for- mer government workers had to account for up to 500,000 hours of leave. They could have informed the Conservative government at the time and sat back and watched the fur f ly. What the managers chose to do was settle the "leave reconciliation" privately with their employees, asking them to pay back the extra time owing to the Justice Department. Here's where all of them made a big mistake. That much missing time in a government department, whether it is discovered and punished or not, by law, has to be reported to the government. Instead, they decided to deal with it themselves in private and not tell higher- ups or the federal cabinet. The president of the Treasury Board at the time, Tony Clement, says he was never told. Former justice minister Rob Nicholson says the same thing, as does Peter MacKay, who has quit politics. Back in 2013, when the Conservatives were still in power, somebody in the Jus- tice Department noticed that some government lawyers had received a pay bonus of somewhere between $1,000 and $10,000 as well as a nice salary increase, all in the same year. That practice is common enough in private enterprise, but it is forbidden by a new law in the federal government. An internal investigation followed. It turned out 74 lawyers had raked in lump-sum bonus pay amounts of $1,064 to $9,908. About a dozen Public Prosecu- tion Service of Canada lawyers had also received cheques. In all, it averaged out to a payback of about $5,000 per govern- ment lawyer. Justice Department lawyers earn be- tween $70,000 and $220,000 a year. Their pay is based on what lawyers in private enterprise with their skills and experi- ence would normally earn. The govern- ment never went after the lawyers who had been involved in the screw-ups. "We were able to reconcile the issue," says Pierre Legault, the associate deputy minister of justice for Canada. "There's nobody to be punished. Certainly we did not blame our employees." What the government did was teach managers and government lawyers how to use the two different computer sys- tems properly, even if it means entering the same data on two different computer systems. Union leader MacKay says the employees and lawyers had never tried to pull a fast one on the government. The cheques had all been approved by depart- ment managers. It amounted to getting the money back or the time off. The government made it easier on employees by deciding that they would have to pay back only about 10% of each government paycheque they got. It hasn't been easy for Justice Depart- ment management to locate all those lawyers who got leaves not owed to them. Some have left the service for private enterprise. Some have retired, and some have gone off to who knows where. Department officials say they don't know how much bonus pay, if any, is still left to be collected. The old computers are still in place, cranking out their con- tents for lawyers and management, and from time to time for inspectors, but at least everybody is more careful now how they enter data. LT uRichard Cleroux is a freelance reporter and columnist on Parliament Hill. His e-mail address is richardcleroux34@gmail.com. The Hill Richard Cleroux Some good gender insight You hear it anecdotally; at least I do: the stories of dedicated lawyers burnt out by unpaid bills and unstable incomes, and struggling with building their own practice with a life outside of work. More often than not, these are stories told to me by women. Thanks to new research from the Criminal Lawyers' Association, there is now better insight into issues around the retention of women in criminal law in Ontario, and some possible ways to improve it. Partici- pants in focus groups shared their thoughts. The report also used data from Legal Aid Ontario, the Law Society of Upper Canada, and survey results from the CLA. So what are women up against? "A large proportion of women discussed the financial and logistical difficulties associated with taking time off to have a child. Women fur- ther identified the financial challenge associated with being in private defence practice, with the unpredictability of income and the difficul- ties of building a business of one's own, coupled with heavy reliance on legal aid certificates, ripe with inherent issues of low rates of pay and delayed payments for work done. A number of women further dis- cussed frustrations over gendered differences in treatment by judges and other court actors, seen as making an already challenging career all the more difficult," says "The Retention of Women in the Private Practice of Criminal Law: Research Report." There are no simple solutions. That's what makes gender inequities in all workplaces so unsettling — and pernicious. What makes this especially distressing is the fact that I would argue that what makes a great criminal lawyer — at least from those I know and admire — is not only their razor-sharp intelligence and great legal skills but their compassion in dealing with clients. I would urge all lawyers to look at what survey participants said could lead to better retention of women in criminal law, such as "the desire for great- er mentorship and support by more senior women in criminal law; improved financial support for women to take maternity leave; having fixed court end times to help ease the stress of the uncertain work hours; and greater education of the judiciary to minimize gender-based differences in the court- room." Brava to that. LT

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