Dear Colleague:
We are the FullStop Team of bencher candidates for the upcoming Law Society election. You may know some of us from the previous election as StopSOP. We ran on the platform of repealing the Statement of Principles requirement as ideological compelled speech. We did that. But we were able to accomplish little else because we held only 22 of the 53 seats at Convocation. The majority of benchers defeated our efforts to make the Law Society less ideological, less wasteful, less arrogant, and less intrusive.
In our view, the Law Society has lost its way. It has strayed from its core mandate of ensuring competence and ethical conduct in the public interest. Instead, it has increasingly become a political institution with a political agenda.
In this election, we are back with a renewed slate of incumbent benchers and new candidates, and an invigorated mission. We hope to put a FullStop to the path the Law Society is on. In the weeks ahead, we will share with you our vision of what has gone wrong at the Law Society and what must be done to put things right. For now, though, our mission can be put simply:
REDUCE the Law Society budget, annual fees, and bureaucratic interference in the business of members and firms ("Stop Bloat")
RESTORE the Law Society to its core mandate of regulating competence and integrity in the public interest, and curtail mission creep ("Stop Creep")
REMOVE social engineering, group identity politics, and "woke" or other ideological agendas from the Law Society ("Stop Woke")
The truth is, most of us never really aspired to be benchers. But we could not leave the Law Society to entrenched activists, and felt compelled to step up. We are not a political party, we have diverse perspectives, and each individual FullStop bencher will vote as he or she sees fit - but we all share the broad concerns and goals listed above.
Encourage your friends and colleagues in the legal profession to become aware of what it is at stake in this bencher election. We ask for your support to return the Law Society to its proper role as a neutral regulator.
Sincerely,
The FullStop Team
