B.C. lawyer has cause — will litigate

Coutlee wins right to have elder on panel

On paper, George Coutlee sounds like an outlaw lawyer — a rebel who has what others in the profession call a “conduct history” and a bad attitude.

In real life, he’s a candid charmer who cites an episode of the aged TV series Have Gun — Will Travel, an old-school western about a gunslinger-for-hire named Paladin.

(My bias is I may be the only person, aside from Coutlee, who remembers the damn show, which ran in the late ’50s through early ’60s, and so I was inclined to like him.)

Coutlee briefly made the news a couple of weeks ago when the Law Society of British Columbia reluctantly agreed that as an Indigenous man (Coutlee uses the term “Indian” and strains to use more modern words), he’s entitled to have an elder on the panel that will hear an aged complaint against him.

As the law society put it in its Nov. 16 decision, “He (Coutlee) does raise his personal concern that, as an Indigenous person, (the complaint) reflects a biased institutional process that ‘strikes at the dignity of a Status Indian.’”

Coutlee said it rather more plainly.

Tuesday in a phone interview, in a reference to what I think may have been Return to Fort Benjamin in season 3 of Have Gun — Will Travel, he mentioned the Paladin episode about a fellow who was being blamed by the cavalry for a murder he didn’t commit.

“Paladin found him first … the posse comes by, they’re gonna arrest him, they referred to him as a dirty, rotten, stinking Indian … That’s the kind of era (through which) a lot of people kind of look at Indians. I think that kind of carries through; it’s not a clear brush all the way through, but it does have some relevance.”

Coutlee’s point, somewhat elliptical, is “there’s a lot to be said to being judged by your peers.”

Formally, the complaint against him is in 2005-06 he “provided legal services” to a person known only by her initials, F.E., and breached a 1997 law society order against him, suspending him from all but criminal law and personal-injury claims, and that when he filed an affidavit on this woman’s behalf in an American court, he failed to disclose the suspension.

In the ’97 instance, he was accused of keeping lousy records (he agreed) and once arranged for one client to loan another $3,000. Part of the money was to pay for disbursements he’d already incurred on the second client’s behalf and though he recommended the lender get independent legal advice, he didn’t ensure she did.

So for that his practice was ordered restricted — apparently forever — to criminal defence and personal injury only.

Fast-forward to the 200506 complaint.

It is a convoluted story, but basically Coutlee was attempting to help a sisterin-law, who lived in Oregon and was separating from her husband, who allegedly appropriated 25 per cent of her land and, Coutlee said, “I guess he kind of treated her badly, took advantage of her.”

But in his mind, Coutlee said, because of the alleged appropriation of land, he saw it as a case of fraud.

“I felt, given there was a fraud committed … I was within my practice restriction,” he said. He was completely up front about the restriction.

The file, by the time he got to it, was enormous and Coutlee went through it so he could challenge an application that was going to court in Oregon. The sisterin-law also had another lawyer, who actually had carriage of the case, but Coutlee had provided an affidavit for the court.

In any case, the lady won, but ended up being convinced by the husband to put the land up for sale.

“It went on for years,” Coutlee said, “but it never sold.”

Just before she died, the woman’s son came into the picture and Coutlee said it was the son who filed the complaint against him at the law society.

At the hearing, which was to proceed in August, Coutlee first asked the complaint be stayed on the grounds it went against natural justice and lost.

Then he asked the hearing panel include either an Indigenous lawyer or elder.

The seven-page decision makes it clear the law society and the panel were deeply annoyed Coutlee raised the issue at the last moment.

In fact, the panel said, he’d asked about the possibility July 30 and was smartly “advised that he must make a written application in accordance with Rule 4-36.”

Instead, the panel said, he continued with his vacation plans and left town. He never offered an explanation beyond that, either.

The law society opposed delaying the hearing.

The three-member panel gritted its collective teeth (the decision practically screams “But he didn’t play by our rules!”) in granting Coutlee’s application, but grant it they did.

As for Coutlee, he was serene.

“There’s so much documentation,” he said cheerfully. “I feel confident once a First Nations person is on and I go through the relevant documents … I’m hoping I’ ll be successful.”

No date has yet been scheduled.