Canadian Lawyer

April 2008

The most widely read magazine for Canadian lawyers

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opinion TO P CO U R T TAL E S BY PHILIP SLAYTON 'I can do better than that' The rise of the middle-class, self-represented litigant may be here. was evident that the practice was not for him. He went on instead to an in- teresting career in the artistic and media world, and now is a successful film pro- ducer. Marty had seen a column I wrote in Canadian Lawyer a few months ago about self-representation before the Supreme Court of Canada. "You really want to know about self-representa- tion?" Marty said. "Speak to Michael Alexander. He was my classmate at the U of T. He represented himself before the Supreme Court and has plenty to say about it." So I looked up the 2005 Supreme Court of Canada case of Royal Bank of Canada v. State Farm Fire and Casualty Co., and set off in search of Michael Alexander, who was one of the appellants. The facts in Royal Bank v. State Farm T were simple enough. State Farm had in- sured a house that burned down while unoccupied. The house had been con- trolled successively by the Royal Bank and Michael Alexander, both of whom held mortgages that had defaulted. Nei- ther mortgagee owned the property, choosing to proceed by power of sale rather than foreclosure. After the fire, both claimed under the State Farm pol- icy. State Farm refused to pay up, saying that the appellants had failed to notify it that the house had been vacated, which was a change material to risk requiring notification under the policy. The Su- preme Court found unanimously for the appellants, deciding that the clause relied upon by State Farm was incon- sistent with the main provisions of the insurance policy and was superseded by those provisions. Royal Bank and State Farm were, of course, represented by practising law- yers. Michael Alexander represented himself. He thought his lawyers had done a bad job at the Court of Appeal. Alexander e-mailed me that, as he sat in the courtroom taking notes, "my con- stant thought was, 'I can do better than that.' After the case was lost at the Court of Appeal, I decided that I couldn't trust my fate (I was facing bankruptcy) to the 'experts' and that I was going to have to www. C ANADIAN mag.com APRIL 2008 21 he other week I bumped into my old friend Marty Katz. Marty was once my articling student. Talented lawyer though he was, it ILLUSTRATION: JOE WEISSMANN

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