One of the hardest truths about the legal profession is that the public almost never experiences a lawyer as an abstract, generic professional. In fact, most people have very little experience with a lawyer and, if they do, it is at a vulnerable moment in time when they expect that their lawyer can be trusted (eg. closing of a real estate deal, a distribution of an estate, a divorce, a personal injury, a wrongful dismissal, etc.).
So when a case emerges alleging that a lawyer abused that very trust, the damage does not stay confined to that individual lawyer. It bleeds outward, staining the reputation of thousands of lawyers who have done nothing wrong.
That is what makes the Maria Mikhailitchenko case so troubling. The case is serious. Very serious. She operated her own law practice near Bathurst and Wilson, providing legal services in civil litigation, family law and real estate.
The Law Society just found this lawyer guilty of professional misconduct for knowingly misappropriating millions of dollars from her clients using her trust account. This lawyer used her trust accounts to hold and disburse more than $59 million for purposes unrelated to her legal services. The Law Society found that Mikhailitchenko used her trust accounts to deposit millions of dollars of cheques and then paid out those funds to herself.
So where is Maria?
Mikhailitchenko disappeared two years ago. The Law Society is unaware of her whereabouts. Toronto Police have asked for the public’s help to track her down.
In Ontario, there are over 60,000 licensed lawyers. Most are trustworthy, honest and ethical. Most do excellent work. Most really care about their clients.
Why does a case like this hit so hard? Because trust accounting is not a technical back-office issue. It is the moral centre of legal practice. Lawyers are entrusted with money that is not theirs and must treat that money with exacting discipline. The Law Society’s own materials emphasize that lawyers and paralegals must know their clients, understand the purpose of the retainer, and assess whether they may be assisting fraud or other illegal conduct in financial transactions.
When a lawyer is found to have used trust accounts for improper purposes, the public does not see a bookkeeping failure. It sees betrayal by someone who was supposed to be the safest person in the room to trust with their money.
That is why people so often say they do not trust lawyers. It is not merely because legal services are expensive or litigation is stressful. It is because the lawyer-client relationship is built on profound informational imbalance. The client usually cannot monitor what is happening in real time. The client must rely on the lawyer’s candour, competence and fidelity. When that trust is broken, the injury feels personal, and systemic all at once.
The public does not say “that one lawyer failed.” It says “all lawyers are crooks”
The public’s anger is understandable. For many clients, this one lawyer occupied a position of authority, licenced by the Law Society. With her licence, she used and misused her position of trust and her trust accounts to misappropriate her clients’ money. The mischief of such cases is that they do double damage: first to the direct victims, and second to the honest majority of lawyers whose integrity becomes harder to prove in the aftermath.
So what is the real lesson of Maria Mikhailitchenko? It is not that lawyers, as a class, are crooks. It is that trust in the legal profession is fragile, and that a single catastrophic breach can undo years of quiet, ethical service by thousands of others. That is why lawyers must be relentless about being and demonstrating honesty, integrity, trustworthiness and transparency. Lawyers must call-out lawyers who lie, cheat and deceive.
Lawyers should not lie (can you believe that I had to say that?)
But in the last 30+ years, I have watched lawyers lie to judges, lawyers lie to clients and lawyers lie to fellow lawyers. I admit that I have lost friendships because I called out some lawyers who have been dishonest. I just cannot tolerate the damage that this does.
When lawyers are dishonest, they hurt everyone. They hurt themselves. They hurt their client. They hurt all lawyers. They hurt all of society.
Honest lawyers should be the most outraged by cases like this, because they understand better than anyone else that the public does not distinguish easily between one dishonest lawyer and the profession as a whole.
CASE LINK: https://www.canlii.org/en/on/
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