Legal fees irk residential school claimants

Some formerresidential schoolstudents and lawyers whostand toget millionsin feeswere on opposing sides of a courthouse debate Thursday.

A judge in Regina, Queen's Bench Justice Dennis Ball, has reserved decision and is considering whetherto approve a $2-billion settlement of Indian residential school claims. Judges across Canada are involved in a similar process.

Ball is also looking at how much to pay lawyers from the Merchant Group law firm, which says itrepresents 10,000 people who attended the schools in the 20th century and says for years it worked for freeon many of the files.

The firm, headed by Regina lawyer Tony Merchant, has beenguaranteed between $25 and $40 million, amounts that had some former students shaking their heads on Thursday.

"The lawyers are the ones that are really major, major the winners," said Rosalind Caldwell, a former student of a residential school who's from Saskatchewan's Cote First Nation.

She was in court earlier in the day listening to a day-long discussion over how much the law firm should be paid.

"This is Tony Merchant and all of the lawyers' cash cow and once again we are the ones getting zoomed here," she said outside the courthouse.

But Merchant's lawyer, Eugene Meehan, said the firm took a huge risk by taking on thousands of cases without payment up front and should be rewarded.

"For almost a decade, many lawyers in Canada took significant risk. Lawyers have gone up Everest and come down for these clients, for aboriginal clients, and the lawyers are gladiators for justice," he said.

The government doesn't want to pay any money to Merchant until his firm has gone through a verification process.

Across Canada, more court hearings to study the residential school deal will be held later this fall.

Some 80,000 peoplewho attended the schools, the last of which closed in the late 1990s,are still alive. Thousands of former students have alleged physical and sexual abuse and have sued the federal government and the church organizations that ran the schools.