David Macleod FAED
Update – 5 January 2021
– Good article by Aidan Macnab of the Law Times on the sorry end where after 4.5 years, the Law Society of Ontario deems a fireside chat with a Bencher sufficient to solve the problem where David Faed as a lawyer in Toronto knowingly advertises in a neo-Nazi tabloid that promotes hatred of women and Jews.
2 February 2020
– I am informed that the Law Society Tribunal has a ‘proceedings management conference’ scheduled for 10 February 2020 as this case crawls toward a hearing slower than cold molasses going up a hill in January. It has now been 4-years since my original complaint was filed. Can the Supreme Court please issue a Jordan decision lighting a fire under the buttocks of Law Societies’ discipline procedures?
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The Law Society of Ontario continues its leisurely pace to hold Toronto criminal defence lawyer David Faed accountable for his unprofessional conduct in advertising in a neo-Nazi tabloid whose operators have just been convicted for criminal hate propaganda (note, Faed’s advertising love to the neo-Nazis won him no favours – they retained someone else for their criminal defence). The Law Society has finally cited him for unprofessional conduct and is moving to a hearing before the Law Society Tribunal.
In December of 2015, I was informed that a lawyer was advertising in the neo-Nazi tabloid Your Ward News that was distributed to tens of thousands of homes in Toronto. I didn’t believe a lawyer would knowingly do anything like that, so I contacted Faed directly expressing my concern about him breaching the rules of professional conduct. I spoke with him on the telephone and sure enough, he did know what he was doing and made it clear he intended to continue.
When Faed’s ad appeared in the March of 2016 edition of Your Ward News, I filed a complaint summarized by this portion:
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I believe that the actions of Mr. Faed in knowingly advertising himself as a lawyer in and providing financial support to a newspaper that has published misogynist, anti-Jewish, anti-Muslim, homophobic, and pro-Nazi material constitute unprofessional conduct contrary to Rules 2.1 (integrity), 4.1-2(e) (advertising), 4.2-1(c) marketing, 6.3 (sexual harassment), and 6.3.1 (discrimination/harassment).
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In terms of the Law Society of Ontario, it’s unclear to me how it was humanly possible to take three years to finally issue a citation for unprofessional conduct after receiving a straightforward complaint about a lawyer advertising in a neo-Nazi tabloid. That’s not a functioning system of lawyer discipline.