Stephen Warne on professional negligence, regulation and discipline around the world

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Entries Tagged as 'regulators' duties'

Privy Council on privilege as an answer to legal regulators’ powers of compulsion

December 23rd, 2009 · No Comments

Rosemary Pattenden’s The Law of Professional-Client Confidentiality is one of those books which, until now, I would like to have but could not bring myself to shell out for.  Just now, I spent $134 on a second-hand copy, and here’s why. In a web-based update for the book is a reference to B v [...]

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Tags: Discipline · procedure · regulators' duties

Law Society’s conduct in Goldberg v Ng

October 14th, 2009 · No Comments

Goldberg v Ng [1995] HCA 39; (1995) 185 CLR 83 is exhaustively treated in this sister post.  The purpose of this post is to isolate some comments about the Law Society’s extraordinary conduct in the disciplinary complaint which is the subject of the case. 

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Tags: Legal Services Commissioner · regulators' duties

New complaints system for English solicitors

August 26th, 2009 · No Comments

English firm Weightmans has a little article about the newly formed Office for Legal Complaints’s first discussion paper about the Ombudsman scheme the OLC proposes to establish by 2010.

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Tags: Discipline · Professional regulation · regulators' duties

Offences created by the Legal Profession Act, 2004

August 13th, 2009 · No Comments

Note: I drafted this post last financial year.  Since then, the value of a penalty unit increased today by about 3%, to $116.82, with the result that the dollar figures referred to below will be commensurately too low.  See the details at Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes.

Original post: I acted for a fellow whom the Law [...]

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Tags: Criminal liability · Legal Profession Act · prosecutors' duties · regulators' duties

Commissioner’s unexplained delay reduces penalty for serious misconduct

August 6th, 2009 · No Comments

Speaking of the need for speed as Justice Heydon and I were on this blog yesterday, there are two other instances worthy of reporting.
First, the High Court has recently considered the need for speed in criminal proceedings, and were not nearly as excited about it as in commercial litigation. This time, they rolled the court [...]

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Tags: Discipline · Legal Services Commissioner · Misconduct · costs · mental illness · procedure · prosecutors' duties · regulators' duties · trust monies

Restraints on use of information obtained by compulsion

June 2nd, 2009 · No Comments

The rule in Home Office v Harman governs the use of documents and information obtained by people generally by various forms of compulsion in litigation: the court rules about interrogatories (a form of statute), Court orders for discovery, witness statements served pursuant to an order to do so.  But when I carefully checked this point [...]

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Tags: Legal Services Commissioner · Professional regulation · duties of confidentiality · regulators' duties

Johns v Australian Securities Commission

June 2nd, 2009 · No Comments

This is a little adjunct to my post ‘Restraints on Use of Information Obtained by Compulsion’, a place to store away for future reference the little case note of Johns v Australian Securities Commission (1993) 178 CLR 384; [1993] HCA 56 penned by Justice McKerracher in Apache Northwest Pty Ltd v Agostini [2009] FCA 534.  [...]

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Tags: Legal Services Commissioner · duties of confidentiality · regulators' duties

Validity of a Bureau de Spanque notice requiring information in relation to a complaint

May 24th, 2009 · No Comments

By far the commonest disciplinary prosecution of lawyers in Victoria is for breach of s. 149 of the Legal Practice Act, 1996 or s. 4.4.11 of the Legal Profession Act, 2004.  The Victorian thing to do is to say:
‘Yep, sorry, I didn’t respond.  I was, like, really stressed at the time and had quite a [...]

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Tags: Discipline · regulators' duties

Statutory powers of compulsion to be invoked reasonably

May 14th, 2009 · No Comments

Justice Pagone considered the Commissioner of Taxation’s invocation of a power to compel the production of documents and information (s 264(1)(b) of the Income Tax Assessment Act 1936 (Cth)). In this case, the subject of the compulsion was the Law Institute, more used to flinging such powers around itself.  Legal regulators not infrequently list poorly [...]

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Tags: Criminal liability · Discipline · Legal Profession Act · Legal Services Commissioner · Professional regulation · regulators' duties

More on Law Institute records and public interest immunity

May 14th, 2009 · No Comments

I have previously posted about Justice Pagone’s rejection of the Law Institute’s blanket invocation of public interest immunity to excuse production of documents required for production under a statutory power of compulsion available to the Tax Man.  Now his Honour has decided the case based on the kind of specific arguments he considered to be [...]

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Tags: Practising certificates · Professional regulation · regulators' duties