An article by Peter Munro in The Age provides a surprisingly sophisticated analysis of the 'problem' of vexatious litigants. The unrepresented obsessed do pose problems for the administration of justice. Consider the web of litigation sketched out in Mentyn v Law Society of Tasmania [2004] TASSC 24.

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I was drinking beer at The Peacock the other afternoon, and a VCAT member was muttering about the Supreme Court overturning VCAT decisions on the basis that applications for adjournment were not granted when they could have been cured by an order for costs. The suggestion was that the Court may have overlooked the [...]

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In Chen v Chan [2008] VSCA 2, President Maxwell and Justice of Appeal Redlich dismissed an application by the appellant for an order enjoining the respondent's solicitor and counsel from acting in the appeal. The applicant alleged that there had been wrongdoing by the respondent's lawyers at the trial. In fact that was [...]

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It took an awfully long time — almost 15,000 words — for Justice Hansen to state the bleeding obvious in Attorney-General for the State of Victoria v Shaw [2007] VSC 1148, but in the circumstances, I well understand why his Honour desired to appeal-proof his judgment. Mr Shaw, who as a newly annointed vexatious litigant, [...]

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Skinner's Case [2007] VCAT 917, a claim against a leading labour law firm, was for some reason heard in VCAT's Civil List. A more likely list would have been the Legal Practice List, given that it was a professional negligence claim, albeit one pleaded under the Fair Trading Act, 1999 and the Trade Practices Act, [...]

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The latest and possibly last chapter in the tribulations of Victoria's most senior female silk is to be found in M v VCAT [2007] VSC 89, a decision of Justice Mandie. The barrister was charged on 4 July 2005 with 24 charges of misconduct, and ended up after a hearing of the first [...]

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In M v VCAT [2007] VSC 89, discussed in the next post, the Supreme Court of Victoria's Justice Mandie provided a useful treatment of the law relating to abuse of process as applied to disciplinary tribunals. It is set out below in full.

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I have been involved in teams of litigators on the biggest cases around with dedicated IT people fixing everything IT related, and consider myself to be relatively well aware of the perils of electronic documents. But some metadata slipped out with a document not so long ago, a comment which I could not see in [...]

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The following passage from the NSW Court of Appeal's decision in Lindsay v Health Care Complaints Commission [2005] NSWCA 356 (Hunt AJA, others agreeing) casts some doubt on whether a medical disciplinary tribunal presided over by a judge had power to stay a disciplinary proceeding as an abuse of process. The issue arose in the [...]

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In "Whistleblowers and the Law of Defamation: Time for Statutory Privilege?" [2005] 3 Web JCLI, David Lewis cites More v Weaver [1928] 2KB 520 as authority for the general proposition that lawyer-client communications are absolutely privileged, that is, that they may not be sued upon in defamation. I have not read the case to check [...]

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