Transferring monies from trust to pay legal fees: can a client stymie an accrued right to appropriate fees by a late objection to the transfer?

Update, 8 August 2017: This decision is promising as a source for the answer to this question: Grope Hamilton Lawyers (Reg’d) v Prater & Prater Kitchens Pty Ltd [2017] SASC 54.

Original post: Say you’re a solicitor.  You send a bill to your client noting your intention to pay it from monies in your trust account held for the client.  Seven days go by and there is no objection to the transfer.   Say at this point you have a perfectly good entitlement to appropriate your fees from trust.  But you don’t get round to transferring the money on the 8th day.  And then the client objects to the transfer, belatedly. Can the solicitor ignore the out of time objection and transfer the money?   Continue reading “Transferring monies from trust to pay legal fees: can a client stymie an accrued right to appropriate fees by a late objection to the transfer?”

Lessons from a tome in the dome on the assignment of suits’ fruits

Cruelly, the Legal Services Commissioner prosecuted my client recently for disbursing monies from his trust account to the wrong person, albeit without the slightest dishonest intent, which he said would be regarded by competent and reputable peers as disgraceful or dishonourable.  I say ‘cruelly’ because he made me go to the Supreme Court Library, and read impenetrable equity texts in its dome for hours.  I read the most obscure article I can ever remember reading: P G Turner’s ‘Assignment by Way of Charge’ (2004) Australian Bar Review 280.

The Commissioner said the solicitor’s client had assigned in equity the proceeds of their claims against negligent drivers for the cost of repairing their vehicles.  The assignee was said to be the repairer’s factor.  When the monies came into my client’s trust account, they were said to be ‘charged in equity’ (‘charged in law’ as well in fact, which I never got to the bottom of), such that the solicitor was obliged to pay them not to his client but to the assignee-chargor.  The Commissioner backed down from this claim in the end, but not before I had burrowed into the law.  Harsh.

In this post I gather together some law about assignment of choses in action.  Nothing new.  Just a summary of the law in case you are as ignorant of its nuances as I was before I hit the equity tome in the dome.  The most thorough texts are Heydon, Leeming and Turner Equity Doctrines and Remedies (2015, Lexis) and the superbly written The Law of Assignment by Marcus Smith and Nico Leslie (2013, OUP).

The reason this post is easier to understand and a great deal shorter than either book is that it does not deal with the many exceptions and uncertainties associated with the below propositions, and looks only at the law of Victoria.  And it ignores the Personal Properties and Securities Act 2009. You’d better look up the law yourself if you need to.  What follows might help you make sense of it though. Continue reading “Lessons from a tome in the dome on the assignment of suits’ fruits”