Harry Kopyto is never going to go quietly
Disbarred lawyer, 68, is still fighting to set the record straight — 25 years later
Harry Kopyto is once again on the offensive.
It’s a Monday morning in March, and Kopyto, a former advocate lawyer and one-time Toronto media darling, is reaffirming his reputation as an outspoken gadfly in the ointment of the legal profession.
Disbarred 25 years ago and recently stripped of his ability to act as a paralegal, Kopyto is at a human rights tribunal hearing, fighting for his right to represent a downtrodden woman against a powerful employer while a reporter takes notes.
In other words, he is squarely in his element. “What I’m asking you to do is to set aside your earlier decision,” Kopyto, 68, tells the adjudicator, with his trademark rapid-fire and highminded oratory. “I’m doing this as a matter of principle, out of a commitment I have both to my client and to access to justice.”
The adjudicator has previously banned Kopyto from the proceedings. Convincing him to change his mind is an uphill battle.
After Kopyto was disbarred in 1989 for overbilling Legal Aid — charges he has always claimed were trumped up to boot him from the profession — he promptly set up a paralegal practice. He carried on serving his clients, who stood by his side as many of his former allies turned away, until 2007, when the law society started regulating paralegals, forcing him to apply for a licence.
After the longest licensing hearing in the history of the Law Society of Upper Canada — 51 days over three years — the regulator deemed Kopyto in February to be “ungovernable,” and not in sufficiently “good character” to be a paralegal, despite acknowledging his generosity and devotion to his clients.
“Mr. Kopyto continues to be an enigma,” law society tribunal chair Margot Blight wrote in her decision. “He insists that he supports the rule of law, while asserting that he, and his clients, are entitled to disregard legal rules willy nilly (sic) when conscience so dictates.”
The law society is now seeking $400,000 in legal costs.
Perennially banging down the door of the establishment, Kopyto is, of course, appealing the law society’s recent ruling. In the meantime, however, he is in a more difficult spot than even he is accustomed.
In some respects, watching the consummate rabble-rouser, who once argued cases in the Supreme Court and graced the front pages of major daily newspapers, fight to sit beside a client in a tribunal hearing shows just how far he has tumbled.
But his stubborn determination to keep battling despite it all reveals a more salient truth: as much as his circumstances may have changed, Kopyto hasn’t. “I have no sense of personal consequences. I do what I have to do,” Kopyto confesses in his College St. offices on a recent afternoon. “With joy, I pay a price.” To his critics, Kopyto is publicityseeking, self-righteous and erratic. He is an advocate for the poor who got caught bilking Legal Aid — a fatal error that pushed him from the mar- gins into the abyss.
To his friends, he is misunderstood; a victim of political persecution by institutions too entrenched in conservatism to tolerate him and hamstrung by his own disorganization and stubbornness, which gave the establishment an opening to tear him down.
To his disenfranchised, marginalized clients, he is a hero figure, a rare breed in the legal profession who is willing to take on their cases and fight for what’s right, often for little or no pay.
But wherever the truth lies, one thing is certain: Kopyto has no intention of easing gently into retirement, even if he stops taking cases. Now in his sunset years, the bespectacled firebrand is in legacy mode, and continuing his fight against the law society is central to that endeavour. “It’s an existentialist decision . . . He believes in what he is doing. He thinks it gives his life meaning and it gives other people’s lives meaning. For him, to do this thing is to live,” says Kopyto’s longtime friend, Gord Doctorow.
The allegations that led to Kopyto’s disbarment soon shifted from questions of his conduct to a more damning charge: bilking Legal Aid out of $150,000 from 1984 to 1986. Among the more egregious examples of inflated billing was a claim that he had worked more than 24 hours in a single day.
Kopyto has always maintained that he was unfairly targeted. As he told the Star in 1989, “I think the law society is leaving no stone unturned to rid the world of Harry Kopyto.”
If anything, Kopyto says he was guilty of poor bookkeeping due to the high volume of cases he took on, and that if he overbilled Legal Aid on some days, he underbilled on many more.
In his defence, he says he was never asked to repay the money to Legal Aid and never faced criminal charges. Perhaps most significantly, the law society’s decision to disbar Kopyto triggered the first written dissent in history by bencher Thomas Carey, who said, “I am so fundamentally in disagreement with the majority . . . that I am compelled to state my reasons.”
Kopyto sees the current proceedings as more of the same. Under the licensing rules, lawyers can apply to become “grandparented” paralegals. But the Law Society Act requires that licenses be issued only to applicants who are “of good character,” a somewhat subjective measure, which, in Kopyto’s case, triggered a “good character” hearing. “It’s not transparent. It’s not accountable . . . It’s a clubby atmosphere for sure,” he says of the law society hearings.
The notice of appeal he recently issued to the law society is classic Kopyto. He alleges, among other things, that the law society has violated his Charter Rights as well as unjustly interfered in his right to become a grandparented paralegal under a regulator scheme “that was not constitutionally valid.”
The law society declined to comment on its past battles with Kopyto or the current dispute. Spokeswoman Susan Tonkin said only that the law society’s various decisions “speak for themselves.”
The recent ruling states that Kopyto’s record-keeping “has not improved” since his 1989 disbarment, which “demonstrates a lack of rehabilitation.” It claims he owes $1.3 mil- lion in back taxes, which, according to Kopyto, is the result of financial difficulties he suffered after being disbarred.
“When you have interest building up over the years, it becomes impossible,” says Kopyto, adding that he helped raise two young children after separating from his ex-wife.
The decision also claims he has provided unauthorized legal services “on hundreds of occasions” in the name of giving access to justice to those who could not otherwise afford it.
In assessing Kopyto’s conduct at the recent hearing, the tribunal chair found his behaviour so similar to what was described in his 1989 disbarment hearing that she simply cribbed from the law society’s previous findings. “His presentation is histrionic, bombastic, obstructive, argumentative and aggressive. He speaks like a machine gun, is repetitive and undeniably committed to his cause,” the report states. For Kopyto, setting the record straight begins with looking at the documented past, chronicled by the media coverage he so doggedly pursued in his heyday.
Within moments of sitting down for an interview in his office, Kopyto is back on his feet, retrieving yellowed newsprint from banker’s boxes overflowing with clippings.
There were single mothers fighting rent increases in public housing. The wrongful dismissal of John Damien, a jockey fired by the Ontario Racing Commission in 1975 for being gay. And the fallout from Kopyto’s in- famous characterization in the Globe and Mail in 1985 of the court and the RCMP as being “so close . . . you’d think they were put together with Krazy Glue.”
Kopyto made the comments after a provincial court judge tossed out a lawsuit he brought against the RCMP on behalf of a Toronto man. He steadfastly refused to apologize, even after he was convicted of contempt in 1986 for “scandalizing the court.”
Kirk Makin, who covered the justice beat for more than 30 years at the Globe and recorded the “Krazy Glue” quote, recalls Kopyto in his prime. “Harry stomped across these sensitivities, regulations and shibboleths without fear,” Makin says.
Amid protest from lawyers, civil rights activists and the media, a Court of Appeal overturned Kopyto’s contempt conviction in 1987, a decision that won lawyers more leeway to publicly speak out against judges.
But Kopyto did not emerge unscathed. “From that point on, my days were numbered,” he says. “I was going to be buried in a zinc coffin, it was just a question of when.”
(The law society hearing came after his criminal contempt conviction was overturned.)
By Kopyto’s unverified estimation, there have been 1,000 articles written about him. A search of the Star’s archives shows he may not be far off: his name has appears in nearly 300 stories from 1986 to present.
“This is a record for him — his way of really understanding the mark that he left,” said Kopyto’s daughter, Erica. “It’s something that he will repeat often, and not just for people who don’t know him. It’s what he talks about with us.” The essence of Kopyto may be unknowable to the law society, but he has a few well-worn theories about why he is the way he is.
Born to Jewish parents in a German displaced persons camp in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Kopyto says he was “eaten away” as a child by the question of why he was alive, while his grandparents and cousins perished.
He is a perennial outsider who delights in being underestimated and scratches at the veneer of the establishment with abandon. But it seems he has never been further on the periphery than he is today.
His disbarment — particularly in light of the Legal Aid charges — was a disappointment to many of the progressive lawyers that rallied around him during the Krazy Glue period.
“They said, ‘Harry, how could you do this to us?’ ” Kopyto recalls. “Everybody evaporated.”
Kopyto’s battered reputation took another hit when his former girlfriend, now-disbarred immigration lawyer Angie Codina, ran into her own trouble with the law society and the courts, beginning in1989. She was later convicted in Toronto of defrauding Legal Aid and, in the U.S., of grand larceny, and now faces charges in Canada for unauthorized practice under the Immigration Act.
Codina told the Star she is appealing the conviction in the U.S. and is asking the justice minister to review the charges in Canada, which she denies. She said she believes she was targeted by the law society because of her association with Kopyto. The two parted ways in the ’90s. Back at the human rights tribunal hearing, the adjudicator has refused to change his mind about Kopyto.
Despite raising “some very important issues” about access to justice, Kopyto, he says, no longer has the credentials to formally represent his client, and had indicated he provided legal advice to clients so could not sit beside her “as an unpaid friend.”
Kopyto offers some last-minute advice to his client, who suffers from severe depression and alleges she was harassed by her employer. “Go in there and give them hell,” he says.
Through tears, she thanks him for everything he has done. “You’re going to be there with me no matter what,” she says. “I promise — I’ll do the best that I can.”
Kopyto is at back of the room as the hearing resumes. After a few moments, he slips on his coat, collects his briefcase and walks quietly out the door.