Like doctors and teachers, lawyers govern themselves.

The law society is responsible for regulating Ontario’s 46,000 lawyers and 5,000 licensed paralegals. Its website states that it has a duty to “protect the public interest” and to “act in a timely, open and efficient manner.”

Of the approximately 4,700 complaints received annually, about 3,100 are authorized for full investigation. About 100 make it to a disciplinary hearing each year.

It can take years before the law society makes a decision on disciplinary action. In one case the Star found, it took more than five years to deal with two lawyers accused of fronting a $1.5-million advance-fee scam. One lawyer was disbarred, while the other was allowed to resign his licence to practice.

Disciplinary hearings are open to the public and are conducted by tribunals made up of “benchers” — mainly elected lawyers and paralegals and some appointed “lay” people.

When the Star asked the law society if it reports criminal acts by its members to law enforcement, spokesman Roy Thomas said the regulator encourages complainants to report offences to police, and discipline hearings and other evidence in the public record “can be accessed by police.”

“It would be a serious misrepresentation for you to suggest that the Law Society of Upper Canada does not cooperate proactively with all the law enforcement agencies in the province,” he said.

Det. Sgt. Cameron Field of the Toronto Police Service’s financial crimes unit said the force does not “pick and choose” complaints posted on the websites of regulatory bodies.

“If one of these organizations became aware of criminal wrongdoing and did not report it to us then we would be very concerned,” he said. “It is essential for the well-being of these organizations and in maintaining public confidence in their ability to properly regulate their respective professions.”

Sherriff said the “vast majority” of clients victimized by lawyer fraud would consent to the law society sharing their names and contact information with police.

“A report to the police from the law society, which invariably has the evidence, will carry greater weight than a report from a client,” he said.

In its decisions, the law society favours innocuous-sounding words like “misapply” and “misappropriate” in place of “steal” and “theft,” and in many cases, provides few details.

For instance, in one disciplinary case the Star found, the law society says that the lawyer is simply “suspended on an interlocutory basis” until a disciplinary panel “varies or cancels the order.” What it doesn’t say is that the lawyer is being investigated for her alleged role in a real estate scam that investors believe could cost them as much as $17 million.

Many discipline summaries also make reference to missing money but don’t include a dollar amount.

Defenders of the law society’s policy of not reporting alleged criminal activity to police argue that doing so could discourage bad lawyers from self-reporting their misconduct and cooperating with investigations.

“We call upon various members of our profession and members of the public to be frank and open with us,” said Toronto criminal lawyer Clayton Ruby, a life bencher of the law society and former chair of the professional regulation committee, which investigates and prosecutes lawyers. “Some of them would not come to us if in fact we were going to report them to police.”

Ruby added that in his opinion the cost of mounting expensive fraud prosecutions is not attractive to police.

Several benchers contacted for this story declined to comment, saying they had received a letter from the law society warning them not to talk to the Star.