Dawson City on hook for legal bill after lawyer broke rules

Dawson City taxpayers are on the hook for a legal bill after a big-city lawyer was reprimanded for not playing by Yukon rules in a court battle.

The Town of the City of Dawson won its fight for damages the miner did to the Dome Road. Normally, that would mean the placer miner who lost the case, Darrell Carey, would have to pay the town's legal bill.

In the two-year lead up to the trial between Dawson City and placer miner Darrell Carey, there were half a dozen pre-trial conferences. Those conferences were supposed to clear up exactly what legal issues would be argued at the trial and what facts would be relied upon to support the arguments from both sides.

But despite all those conferences, Yukon Supreme Court Justice Ron Veale said Dawson City’s lawyer — Vancouver-based James A. Dowler — ambushed the placer miner’s lawyer at the trial with a new issue.

Veale said the town's lawyer filed a 22-page argument which Dowler hadn't mentioned even once in the two years before the trial started.

Veale said it was a blatant abuse of Yukon case management law and as a punishment, Veale said the town will have to pay its own legal bills even though it won the case.

No one knows exactly what those bills will add up to.