A Vancouver lawyer has resigned from the Law Society of B.C. and agreed to a 10-year ban on applying for reinstatement after admitting to repeatedly lying to his clients and fabricating documents to support his lies.
Rajesh Soni admitted the misconduct and agreed to the ban in a proposal submitted to the law society earlier this month. The document was published online this week.
It resolves a citation with 19 allegations of professional misconduct that the regulator issued to Soni in February 2025.
Soni admitted to all of the allegations, which stemmed from four separate client files. The clients names are anonymized in the document as AA, BB, CC, and DD.
The agreement indicates that Soni represented AA on an immigration file in 2021.
“In or about May 2021, the respondent represented to the client that the application was delayed due to the government of Canada’s wait times, when the respondent knew in or about March 2021 that the application had been rejected because he failed to include the required application fee,” the document reads.
Rather than coming clean about the rejected application, the agreement continues, Soni continued to lie to AA, telling him he should expect to receive his permanent residency status in February 2022, fabricating multiple letters to AA that were meant to look like they were from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, and lying to AA’s new counsel in July 2022 about his failure to pay the application fee.
Soni’s behaviour followed a similar pattern with the other three clients.
He represented BB in applications for divorce and name change in B.C. Supreme Court, providing the client with a dozen different fake documents over a two-year period from January 2022 through January 2024.
In reality, Soni had neither “applied for nor obtained” the divorce and name change certificates, according to the agreement.
CC hired Soni to represent him in an appeal regarding a loan dispute. In June 2023, the document indicates, Soni showed the client a document “purporting to be a weekly hearing list for the B.C. Court of Appeal” that showed CC’s appeal on the schedule.
In fact, the hearing had already happened and the appeal had been dismissed, but Soni continued lying to CC and providing him with fake court correspondence to support the lies through January 2024, according to the agreement.
DD’s case is described in the document as a “debt collection matter,” in which Soni told his client he had “commenced the claim” and would file for a default judgment if no response was received within 21 days, when he actually had not submitted a claim at all.
Nevertheless, Soni continued to mislead DD, telling the client that he had obtained a default judgment, when he had not, and fabricating contracts with a law firm and debt collection agency in California, along with other documents.
In all, the lawyer admitted to fabricating 18 documents across the four files, according to his agreement with the law society.
Soni also admitted to forging the signature of another lawyer in the BB matter and drafting a false affidavit for DD to sign.
Other misconduct to which Soni admitted included failing to provide all four clients with “the quality of service expected of a competent lawyer,” improper handling of trust funds, making misleading representations to the law society and breaching a previous undertaking he had made to the regulator.
In accepting Soni’s proposal, the law society’s discipline committee considered some mitigating factors, including his young age and lack of experience, as well as his remorse for his misconduct.
“The respondent has also explained that, during the law society’s investigation into the misconduct and since, he was dealing with various health concerns for which he has been receiving medical treatment,” the document reads.
“The respondent provided medical evidence to the law society in this regard. While the respondent’s medical circumstances do not justify the misconduct, they are a mitigating factor.”
