Appeal Court overturns costs award against local lawyer
KITCHENER — Ontario’s highest court has overturned a judge’s ruling ordering a Waterloo lawyer to pay $100,000.
Brigitte Gratl, who represented a mother whose daughter was made a Crown ward, was previously ordered to pay $50,000 to both the Ontario Legal Aid Plan and another lawyer who later represented the mother.
The costs were ordered in an appeal presided over by a Superior Court judge in Kitchener, Justice Grant Campbell, who had called Gratl’s conduct “inexcusable and reprehensible.”
Gratl appealed the findings of ineffective assistance and the costs award against her. Last week, the Ontario Court of Appeal allowed Gratl’s appeal, overturning the findings.
The case involves a 10-year-old girl who was made a Crown ward. An initial ruling in 2015 by Justice Paddy Hardman cancelled the mother’s access to her daughter.
In an appeal by the biological parents, paid for by legal aid, Gratl “declined, refused or otherwise ignored” the mother’s plea to bring a motion reinstating access, Campbell said.
The judge went on to say Gratl caused “an unnecessary duplication of effort of counsel, unnecessary extra court attendances and a significant consumption of court and counsel’s resources and taxpayer funding.”
Campbell found no error in Hardman’s determination of access but “nonetheless ordered access,” Justice Mary Lou Benotto wrote in a unanimous decision by the Appeal Court wrote.
“Having found no error on the part of the trial judge, the issue of ineffective assistance was moot,” she wrote. “Ineffective assistance of counsel as a ground of appeal has a very narrow application.
“It is not a springboard from which an appellate court engages in a retrospective analysis of every aspect of a lawyer’s conduct. The far-reaching analysis in which the appeal judge engaged is more properly done in the context of a civil negligence action, with all of its procedural safeguards, or a disciplinary investigation by the Law Society of Upper Canada.”
The Appeal Court restored the trial judge’s order of no access to the child.