Are you wondering if Lawyers and Lattes and/or Barrett Tax Law is worth retaining? The reason why we are covering both law firms in one article is that they are owned by the same lawyer, Dale Barrett.

Dale Barrett is a tax lawyer in Toronto. Barrett Tax Law is his main business (money earner) while Lawyers and Lattes is his entrepreneurial project. He runs the law cafe with his wife.

Barrett Tax Law focuses on helping people fight the CRA. Whereas Lawyers and Lattes (L&L) does many areas of law but focuses on things like real estate law and wills (estate law.)

This article is part of our “Clearway Investigates” series, where we do a deep dive into numerous legal tech companies and law firms. 

While parts of this article may seem harsh, we know what we are talking about. There are a lot of positives and negatives regarding Dale Barrett. There is a lot to admire and hate about him and his firm.

I will get into it further down in the article, but the biggest issue I have with the firm is that they are seriously disorganized, and treat people like crap. They have a massive staff turnover, and they screw third parties out of money. I also feel that some of their marketing is deceptive.

Some of the positives include that they are affordable, and they are making an effort to do something innovative in the legal industry. They also have good branding.

This will be explained later in the article.

We have gone through both websites for Lawyers and Lattes and Barrett Tax Law. We have also gone through the online reviews.

What is Lawyers and Lattes?

We will start with Lawyers and Lattes (L&L) and then move on to the tax law firm.

L&L is a law firm located in Toronto and Vancouver. They have a physical location in Toronto, but no “real” location in Vancouver. All work is done by lawyers in Toronto. It’s unclear if they are actually set up as a law firm in BC, or if they have any lawyers there.

There are no lawyers at 422 Richards St #170, Vancouver, BC V6B 2Z4, Canada. This is the address given on the L&L website.

But there is a “law cafe” at 511 Eglinton Ave W, Toronto, ON M5N 1B1, Canada. It’s pretty cool. 

The idea behind Lawyers and Lattes is a coffee shop (with a full drink and food menu) where you can also get legal advice. They sell coffee, tea, and wraps.

A lot of people are afraid to reach out to a law firm, and when I first heard of the idea for a law cafe, I thought the idea was brilliant. I reached out to the owner of the law cafe several weeks after it opened.

You can see some of the services that L&L offers below.

Law Firm Services

The firm does a ton of real estate work. From lease agreements to title searches, and mortgage discharges. Their prices are very good.

I don’t believe the law firm actually does litigation work. My understanding is that they mainly do things like shareholder agreements, NDAs, incorporations, and loan agreements. They also do a lot of Wills for $400.

Photo: This is the food and drink menu at the law cafe.

Below are some of the firm’s other pricing:

• Separation Agreement for $995
• Cohabitation Agreement for $695
• Henson Trust $495
• Probate without a Will $1,945
• Probate with a Will $1,745

Photo: It’s awesome that they managed to flat fee many different legal services.

Lawyers and Lattes Online Reviews

The Toronto office has around 350 reviews. Almost all of the reviews are 5 stars, many of which come from Gmail accounts with no profile picture, who have only done one or two reviews. This is suspicious.

Many of the reviews look fake.

Compare the 350 reviews for the Toronto Office of Lawyers and Lattes with how many reviews the largest law firms in the world get.

You can see that the Vancouver Dentons office only has 11 Google Reviews, and Fasken Vancouver only has 19 reviews. These are firms doing over a billion dollars in sales each year.

Are Lawyers and Lattes over one hundred times larger than Dentons? No way. I understand that firms like Dentons and Faskens serve different clientele than small law firms. Small law firm clients are more likely to leave reviews. However, it’s still strange.

More importantly, have a look at the reviews of Dentons. You can see they are from accounts that have profile pictures. This is what real reviews for law firms look like. They are not fake.

Photo: The Vancouver Lawyers and Lattes locations don’t have many reviews. But the reviews they have are not great.

I once went into Lawyers and Lattes and there was no staff there at all. Another time one of the staff members was crying. She said she was so stressed because of her job. This doesn’t make for a nice cafe experience.

Other times people were coming by because it had been months since they had paid the law firm, and they didn’t hadn’t received their Will. This was a common complaint about L+L online as well.

Barrett Tax Law Reviews

Barrett Tax Law isn’t as interesting as Lawyers and Lattes. It’s really just a tax law firm that helps people fight the CRA. Dale Barrett is one of the most experienced tax lawyers in Toronto, so he gets a lot of clients. The tax law firm is a lot more successful than the law cafe.

As you can see above, there are still way more reviews than one would expect with a law firm. And most of them are 5 stars. This is suspicious.

The company is sometimes late to pay third parties, and this has caused drama in the past. It’s our understanding that sometimes staff and contractors are delayed in getting paid. It doesn’t seem like Dale Barrett cares about his commitments much.

Why do we investigate law firms?

We started our lawyer directory to look for the best, and worst, law firms in Canada.

We also built a law blog that gets over 60,000 visitors each month.

The idea was that there are too many lawyers in Canada. To be specific, 130,000 of them. The public has no way of knowing which ones are good, and which are bad.

The only thing that exists for reviewing lawyers is Google Map reviews, which is a rating system for law firms, not for lawyers.

Our website receives over 1000 reviews for lawyers each month. This has helped the public make better decisions when hiring an attorney.

The public being able to leave reviews for lawyers

But we wanted to take it further than that. We noticed that there was a small group of lawyers who couldn’t live with the idea of the public being able to leave reviews for them.

The idea that they would have to be accountable for their actions, or lack of actions once they had their clients’ money, was unthinkable to them.

When a lawyer or marketing manager for a law firm, asks us for their profile to be taken down, we always say no. 

If we removed every negative review that a lawyer got, then our website would be useless. It would just be a place for positive reviews.

The whole idea of our is to be able to separate the great lawyers from the terrible. We need a blend of positive and negative reviews.

Photo: This is the lobby of Barrett Tax Law.

Lawyers and Lattes/Barrett Tax Law: INVESTIGATION

Many law firms support our mission, and they also see it as a marketing opportunity. We have had many lawyers who have reached out to their clients to ask for reviews. 

We have other attorneys who use our website which ranks high on Google search, due to our high domain authority, to write law articles. They use it as free marketing.

They might write on the topic of Canadian tax law, and then the article appears top of the top page on Google or Bing.

There is nothing wrong with that. We get quality content for our website, and they get clients.

Conclusion on Lawyers and Lattes/Barrett Tax Law

I always felt that Lawyers and Lattes could be much more than it is. The idea is brilliant, and they should have opened locations across Ontario and the United States. I’ve written articles and Google Reviews in the past talking about how I love the innovation behind the idea.

They could have franchised it (or found angel investors) and grown quickly. I would have been happy to help with this. Their marketing and brand positioning is on point. And the cafe looks nice (when the staff aren’t crying in it.)

I don’t think Dale Barrett will change, because I don’t think he wants to. Instead, I hope he will hand L&L over to someone else (outside his family) and let them run it. Someone who actually likes people, and wants to see others succeed. 

Successful entrepreneurs want to help others grow, not milk them for every bit of money and their mental health before disposing of them. If Dale Barrett wants to respond to anything in this article, we will update this article with what he said.

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