Canadian Lawyer

w w w . C A N A D I A N L a w y e r m a g . c o m F e b r u A r y 2 0 1 5 23 developed and accumulated in health law. Notably, all the firm's lawyers, the major- ity of whom are women, have graduate degrees in health law. "If you don't have what we have, you can't and won't go far in this field," said Ménard, who talks as fast as he eats and drinks. "You need to know how to do so many things, like accessing medical records, finding experts, understanding medical issues, [and] have trial experience." He has learned those hard lessons first-hand during his long legal career. Born into humble circumstances in Quebec's Lac St. Jean region in 1953, Ménard was raised in east-end Montreal, where his family moved when he was 11. He says his acute sense of social justice led him to law school at the Université du Québec à Montréal in 1975, a year after the faculty reopened after being shut down by the Quebec government over the radical socialist utterances of faculty members. "I was very comfortable in those waters," said Ménard, flashing a mischievous smile. "Law is very con- servative and people were calling into question the way things were being done. "Many people become lawyers to defend widows and orphans [but] many law schools teach that law is about mak- ing money," he adds. "For me, law is about people, and the greatest professional sat- isfaction we can have is helping people and changing society." After completing concurrently a clerk- ship at the Quebec Court of Appeal and a master's degree in public health care law at the Université de Montréal, Ménard did as most young lawyers of his genera- tion did and opened a general practice of his own. It was in a small basement office in downtown Montreal in 1981. It was during the trial stage of only his fifth client — a woman who had been given a tubal ligation without her consent during a caesarean birth — that Ménard had an epiphany. "I was struck by the disproportions," he recalls about the case, which he lost. "The opposing lawyers did only [health law], they knew the system, had the experts [and] the financial means. It awakened me to the incredible needs of victims in the legal system [and] gave me a goal for my career: to help them." Since advertising was then prohib- ited for lawyers, Ménard began working with the few malpractice victims' groups that existed in Montreal in an effort to make himself known. He notably started giving free information seminars about health law and victims' rights and doing pro bono work, two things he continues to do today. "I'm not an ambulance chaser," Ménard asserts. "I've never solicited cli- ents [and] I've never turned down a case for lack of money. If people come for a first interview, I tell them what I think about their case. If they decide later that they want me to represent them, that's fine. My role is to guide and counsel them, not to decide for them." The same principle, Ménard adds, led to the rise of what he says is his firm's unique billing practice. Instead of work- ing strictly for a percentage of settlements — an approach he says undermines a lawyer's independence and places them in a bad ethical position when advising clients on offers — Ménard shares the financial burden of seeking justice with clients in an effort to keep costs low. "We ask clients to pay the fees of experts, what are a considerable cost in these kinds of cases, and for our legal fees, which we keep to a strict minimum," says Ménard. Then, if and when a settlement is reached, the firm gets a 25-percent share minus legal fees already paid. "That way, if we win, the victim gets more of the settle- ment. If we lose, they owe us nothing, everyone is even. He says he aims to provide access to justice. "My client is the public every- where in Quebec. And our business model is geared to giving the public access to the legal system. It's not based on file billing, but on legal success and outcome." And Ménard has enjoyed ample suc- cess — the bittersweet result, he notes, of medical errors that often occur in pre- ventable patterns he publicly exposes and fights to change. Joined in 1987 by Denise Martin, his high-school sweetheart and now wife and the firm's managing partner, Ménard fields some two dozen calls a day from potential clients at his office near Mon- treal's Olympic Stadium and his child- hood home. "A central orientation of our practice is the promotion of three social norms: access to health care, quality of health care, and security of health care," he says. "That allows us to handle the most vulnerable people. There may be a smaller dollar value in that approach, but there is big human value." In addition to his busy practice, Ménard teaches graduate courses in health law at the Longueuil campus of the University of Sherbrooke. He also does lots of volunteer advocacy work to push for change in Quebec's health care system. A big one was the introduction of Bill 113 in 2002, an initiative that led to the creation of the world's first public monitoring system to identify and track incidents and accidents in public health care institutions in Quebec. As a result of the law, and two pro- visions on victims' rights that Ménard authored, some 500,000 incidents are publicly reported in Quebec each year, and studied to identify common causes such as falls and problems with medica- tion. "I see so many sad stories that could have been easily prevented," says Ménard, who also presided over the panel that produced the legal framework for Bill 52, Quebec's dying with dignity legislation, which was voted into law in June 2014. That's why he's excited by the poten- tial of his newest volunteer effort: a new French-language web site he cre- ated to provide the public with news and information about Quebec's health care system, and people's legal rights in it. "It's the project of my life," Ménard says about vosdroitsensante.com, which was scheduled for launch Jan. 20. "It explains everything people need to know about our health care system." For me, law is about people, and the greatest proFessional satisFaction we can have is helping people and changing society.

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