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Free tickets to a great seminar

I’m chairing what should be a great seminar for litigators at Melbourne’s RACV Club on 28 August 2013.  Judicial Registrar Meg Gourlay who is one of the two decision makers who is handling most of the solicitor-client taxations in the State at the moment is the lead singer, talking about the changes to Order 63 of the Supreme Court Rules and the new Supreme Court scale which is no doubt the harbinger of new scales in other courts too.  Despite my complete failure as a blogger to bring them to your attention, these are big changes: so big I have never quite got around to writing a post about them, a bit like the post about the decision in Fritsch v Goddard Elliott.  So it is well worth finding out what the Costs Court figures they mean.  Apart from anything else the more mysterious bits have been chopped out of the scale which means that lay lawyers uninitiated in the dark arts of that most mysterious of cabals — the costs lawyers — might actually be able to draw bills themselves with a bit of orthodox education, a spot of which the Judicial Registrar is going to engage in.

The band is pretty hot too.  Anna Sango has bravely taken on the task of speaking about a strange new concept getting a workout at the salons of the most elegant cost lawyers: ‘proportionality’, absolutely all the rage I’m told amongst aristocrats in England whose favourite pastime seems to be inventing more rules for that greatest of all English board games, litigation.  Frankly, it seems like a dangerously French concept to me, a sly limit on the individual’s right to litigate matters of principle and bugger the expense, but Sango will no doubt tell us that it’s more nuanced than that.  Then, after all that esoterica, Paul Linsdell, one of the head honchos of the behemothic Blackstone Legal Costing will speak on tips and traps when arguing costs in litigation.  The traps are newly refreshed thanks to the subject matter of Judicial Registrar Gourlay’s talk, and so this hoary old chestnut of a topic will be worth a listen.  And then Debra Paver, who has given evidence in a few security for costs applications in her time, will speak on the inherently useful subject of how to argue for and against such applications.

I have two otherwise unbelievably expensive tickets available for enticing supplicants.

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What is a signature?

I have spent too much of the last couple of years considering what it is for a person to sign a document, as a result of a disciplinary prosecution of my solicitor client for forgery after he wrote his wife’s name on a guarantee pursuant to a written authority and then signed his name as witness to her signing. The case was decided on an unrelated technical point.  But here’s what I’ve learnt about signatures, in a nutshell (some of it from you, dear readers):

  • A person signs when they affix a mark indicating their assent to the document, either personally or by an agent: there is no obligation that people able to do so sign their usual signature or write their name;
  • The agent may write the principal’s name or write their own (emulating the principal’s usual signature would presumably be problematical);
  • An agent who affixes the principal’s signature may personally attest that signature;
  • An agent who writes the principal’s name without the conventional ‘p.p [the principal]’ or ‘per [the principal]’ and without otherwise indicating that the document was signed through an agent generates an efficacious signature;
  • Though there are Australian and UK cases in which the Court has not criticised witnesses who attest signatures affixed by agents despite the document bearing no indication of agency, there is also Australian authority that such attestation does not satisfy a statutory requirement for enforceability of a document that it be attested as having been signed ‘in the presence of the signatory’.

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Disciplinary costs insurance unavailable to solicitors, for now

Readers of my last post but one would be forgiven for thinking that the cover for costs of disciplinary investigation and prosecution referred to is available to Victorian solicitors as well as for Victorian barristers.  Turns out it is not, for the time being.  Doctors and solicitors are different in that regard.  It would be remiss of me not to mention that that gentleman of the profession, Geoff Gronow, provides invaluable free support to solicitor members of the Law Institute of Victoria who find themselves the subject of a disciplinary complaint in his capacity as LIV Members’ Advocate.  And in Queensland, the Law Society has a scheme which provides free legal advice to solicitors who receive a letter from the Legal Ombudsman or the Law Society in a disciplinary investigation.

I’m sorry for the confusion I must have engendered.  But the interesting thing is that the post obviously struck a chord, to an extent which surprised me and, it would seem, certain others. There are a lot of solicitors who would love to have this cover. Paddy Oliver at Lexcel, a risk management consultancy for solicitors, bemoans lawyers’ abject failure to manage what he refers to as ‘regulatory risk’. Perhaps solicitors are in fact more interested than they are given credit for, but frustrated by a lack of easy fix. So great has the interest been that Affinity had a fresh look at extending the cover to Victorian solicitors, and while it was doing so I held off on publishing this clarificatory post, but it seems that it’s not to be, for now at least.  But if it is an issue that is important to you, tell Affinity that it is something you would purchase, and raise it with Raynah Tang, the (rather good) President of the Law Institute: @livpresident. Continue reading “Disciplinary costs insurance unavailable to solicitors, for now”