Tweet Kinghorn v HKAC Asset Management Services (AFFL) Pty Ltd [2010] NSWDC 232 reviews the law at the extremities of the tort of malicious prosecution. I must say that I had always assumed that there needed to be a criminal prosecution before the tort of malicious prosecution might be made out, but there is no [...]

[Read more →]

Tweet If you are a solicitor and someone other than your client or former client has lodged a disciplinary complaint against you in Victoria, you should not disclose the subject matter of any communications to which legal professional privilege attaches, or might arguably attach, unless you are instructed to do so by your client or [...]

[Read more →]

Tweet 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 [...]

[Read more →]

Tweet 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. 

[Read more →]

Tweet 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.

[Read more →]

Tweet 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 [...]

[Read more →]

Tweet 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 [...]

[Read more →]

Tweet 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 [...]

[Read more →]

Tweet 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 [...]

[Read more →]

Tweet 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 [...]

[Read more →]