Shawn Beaver asked the court to change his disbarment to a three-year suspension
The Alberta Court of Appeal said it would not reverse the disbarment of an Edmonton lawyer who admitted to financial misconduct, ruling that errors that Law Society of Alberta benchers made in the lawyer’s case were too minor to warrant overturning the penalty.
The appeals court also declined to reduce the $120,000 penalty that benchers imposed on Shawn Beaver of Beaver, Leebody and Associates, stating that the penalty was reasonable given that “the citations involving the most serious misconduct of misappropriation and lack of integrity were… ultimately proven by the LSA.”
Justices Patricia Rowbotham, Jane Fagnan, and April Grosse rendered the unanimous decision.
The LSA first became aware of Beaver’s misconduct in 2015, when Beaver admitted to the law society that there was a $180,000 deficiency in his firm’s pooled trust account – a shortfall that he attributed to his misconduct. Beaver contacted the LSA after his associates confronted him about the deficiency.
Beaver told the LSA that he failed to comply with the law society’s accounting rules when transferring funds from the firm’s trust account to an operating account. His associates also reported the trust account deficiency to the LSA, alleging Beaver’s misconduct caused it.
A day after Beaver alerted the law society, a custodianship order was issued for his property and business. The LSA suspended him shortly after.
The LSA conducted an investigation and issued 12 citations against Beaver, alleging that in addition to misappropriating $180,000 from his firm’s pooled trust account, he did the same with $115,000 that he took from the trust account of a client who was unhoused, mentally disabled, and struggling with substance abuse issues.
Some of the citations also alleged that Beaver mishandled the sale of a home he owned with his former common-law partner and took payment from client trust funds before he completed work for those clients.
Beaver admitted he violated the LSA’s accounting rules, failed to meet accounting obligations related to his law practice, and mishandled the sale of his house. An LSA hearing committee concluded Beaver had misappropriated more than $300,000 from clients within and outside of the firm’s trust accounts and had covered up the misconduct by using fictional accounting entries.
The LSA rejected Beaver’s arguments that alcoholism, depression, and stress related to his mother’s death, as well as his breakup with his common-law partner, drove him to taint his otherwise unblemished record as a lawyer. The law society disbarred Beaver and ordered him to pay $120,000 in costs.
Beaver appealed to the LSA’s benchers, who affirmed the law society’s findings.
The court of appeal agreed with the decisions of the benchers and the LSA, dismissing Beaver’s argument that the benchers made multiple errors when they upheld the decision to sanction him. The court also dismissed Beaver’s requests to replace his disbarment penalty with a three-year suspension instead and to reduce the $120,000 he owed in costs by 50 percent.
Conceding that the hearing committee made a mistake when they determined that Beaver would have continued to engage in misconduct if he had found a way to replenish the trust accounts he’d taken money from, the appeals court said that error was nonetheless not enough to warrant an overturning of Beaver’s sanctions.
“We are satisfied that the hearing committee considered the appellant’s long unblemished career, the medical evidence of depression and alcohol abuse, and his personal circumstances but found that these did not mitigate the appropriate sanction to any great degree,” the court said.
“The conduct here is most serious,” the court said, adding that “there were many victims, including the clients of the firm whose money was held in trust, DI, and CF. The effect of his actions on his associates and staff was described by some as devastating.”
The court also found that the LSA hearing committee had already placed a limit on what Beaver owed because he successfully defended himself against some of the LSA’s citations. However, the hearing committee correctly found that he was guilty of the most serious citations, so the amount he owes in costs was calculated fairly, the court said.
In 2021, Beaver received a prison sentence after he continued practising law after he was disbarred.
In a statement on Wednesday, the LSA told Canadian Lawyer, “The Law Society welcomes the decision of the Court of Appeal dismissing Mr. Beaver’s appeal of the Law Society’s findings of guilt and determination of sanction in this case.”
Counsel for Beaver did not respond to a request for comment.
