A Vancouver lawyer has been suspended four months for misconduct that occurred over a seven-year period and involved a dozen different files. Gary (Kin Ip) Lo admitted the professional misconduct in a consent agreement with the Law Society of B.C., a summary of which was published online earlier this week. His suspension began Nov. 12. According to the summary, the misconduct involved Lo failing to make reasonable inquiries about his clients’ identities and the sources of their funds, as well as failing to make a record of the inquiries he made. He also failed to comply with client identification and verification requirements. Lo worked on the 12 files between December 2015 and June 2022, according to the document, which indicates each of them had “suspicious circumstances,” including “unclear sources of funds,” private loans between individuals rather than commercial lenders and “high-value transactions that were reasonably suspicious given the unknown occupations of the clients.” Many of the files involved two clients—identified in the document as AA and BB—who were arrested in a Vancouver Police Department drug trafficking investigation in May 2016, and whose property was subject to a “security interest” from the province’s Director of Civil Forfeiture. There was also a “lack of discernable connections between the clients and the locations or use of the properties that were sold and purchased” on their behalf, according to the consent agreement. “In total, the lawyer received and disbursed approximately $9 million via his firm’s trust account with respect to the 12 files at issue,” the agreement reads. The four-month suspension is far from the first disciplinary action the law society has taken against Lo. His discipline history includes administrative suspensions in 2007, 2008 and 2009; “an undertaking between June 2010 and March 2021 not to operate as a sole practitioner and not to operate a trust account unless the lawyer had a second signatory;” a practice supervision agreement that has been in place since March 2021; a fine imposed in 2022 and a six-week suspension from September 2023. This history was considered an aggravating factor in the consent agreement. Mitigating factors included Lo’s remorse for his misconduct; his implementation in 2020 of a new software system for opening client files, which is intended to improve his client identification and verification processes; and “periods of delay” during the law society’s investigation that “may have impacted him personally and professionally,” according to the document.
