This story has been amended since first posting.
West Vancouver mayoral candidate Mark Sager is facing a hearing with the Law Society of British Columbia’s discipline committee.
Sager, who was the district’s mayor from 1990 to 1996 and has returned to local politics, is alleged to have broken the law society’s code of professional conduct by accepting two gifts totalling $100,000 in cash from a client, JB, in 2014 and 2015, according to a citation published by the law society.
In 2014, Sager also helped JB prepare her will, which included a testamentary gift for himself. This constitutes professional misconduct under the Legal Profession Act, the citation issued on May 2018 states.
Sager, however, told the News he would appear before the law society’s disciplinary panel to explain his side of the “unusual” case.
“The quote-unquote client was actually a godmother to me – somebody who my parents had as my guardian if anything had ever happened to them. She was like a second mother to me,” Sager said. “I did provide legal services for her and of course, because our relationship, I never charged her a penny. Because of some of the work I did for her, she came into a very large, unexpected amount of cash and she gave to myself. She gave to four other people gifts as well.”
The complaint came not from a client but from JB’s sister, two years after JB died, Sager said.
The law society does allow gifts between family members but it doesn’t specify what constitutes family, Sager noted.
The Law Society of B.C. is the regulatory body for lawyers in the province. The allegations are unproven and must go before a discipline hearing panel to determine if they are valid.
“Those are issues the law society has to deal with and should deal with. I completely support their looking into it. In 27 years of practising law, I can proudly say I have never had a complaint from a client,” Sager said.
Editor's note: This story has been amended to correct an earlier version that stated Sager was under investigation by the Law Society of British Columbia. Sager has already been investigated by the law society; he now faces a hearing to determine the validity of allegations arising from that investigation.
