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

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Entries Tagged as 'current client and past client'

Commissioner’s obligation to charge dishonesty if he intends to allege it

December 4th, 2009 · No Comments

Relatively recently, I posted on the question of whether a Bureau de Spank desiring to rely on a practitioner’s dishonesty or other form of conscious wrongdoing must expressly allege it in the charge, and discussed Walter v Council of Queensland Law Society Incorporated (1988) 77 ALR 228 at 234; [1988] HCA 8.  Now, in Legal [...]

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Tags: Discipline · Ethics · Legal Profession Act · Legal Services Commissioner · Misconduct · Practising certificates · Professional regulation · Striking off · Trust money · amendment · appeals · concurrent duties · conflicts · current client and past client · duty and duty · jurisdiction · natural justice · procedure · trust monies · wilful disregard for rules

Conflict applications to restrain opposing solicitors from acting not interlocutory

August 19th, 2009 · No Comments

In Legal Practice Board v Lashanky [2008] WASC 294, the Supreme Court of Western Australia’s Justice Chambers said that applications to restrain solicitors from acting are not interlocutory applications, so that affidavit evidence may not be given from information and belief (i.e. the hearsay prohibition is not relaxed as it is for interlocutory applications):
‘29    Under [...]

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Tags: Ethics · conflicts · current client and past client

Latest Family Court lawyer’s conflict case

October 5th, 2008 · No Comments

Bracewell & Southall [2008] FamCA 687, a 13 August 2008 decision of Justice Bennett of the Family Court sitting in Melbourne is the latest on lawyers’ conflicts of duties in the context of family law — a whole relatively separate sphere of analysis of lawyers’ conflicts.  It seems to me that injunctions restraining lawyers from [...]

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Tags: Ethics · conflicts · current client and past client · duty and duty

Both sides apply to restrain the other’s lawyers from acting

April 8th, 2008 · No Comments

I prepared an application to restrain a firm of solicitors from acting in a Corporations List matter in the Supreme Court recently, and so have been reading the latest cases about conflict injunctions. The very latest is TJ Board & Sons Pty Ltd v Castello [2008] VSC 91, where the plaintiff applied unsuccessfully to [...]

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Tags: Ethics · conflicts · current client and past client · duties of confidentiality · duty and duty · duty and interest

The US take on past client / current client duty conflicts based on the ‘getting to know you factors’

June 28th, 2007 · No Comments

America’s Legal Profession Blog had posted yesterday on a conflicts case about what we in Australia would call “the getting to know you factors”. The case was Hurley v Hurley, decided on 22 May 2007 by a 5 judge bench of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court. The background is that a lawyer may be [...]

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Tags: Ethics · conflicts · current client and past client · duties of confidentiality · duty and duty

Updates: big words, Texan legal writing, conflicts of duties

May 27th, 2007 · No Comments

In my post “Judge uses big word”, I commented on President Mason’s use of “tergiversation”. Now David Starkoff at Inchoate has noted another’s analysis of the odds of each of the High Court judges other than Justice Kirby being responsible for the appearance of “epexegetical” (which seems to mean “explanatory in a way [...]

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Tags: Ethics · Fiduciary duties · Judges · Legal writing · concurrent duties · conflicts · current client and past client · duties of confidentiality · duty and duty · duty and interest · interest of associate

Chinese wall crumbles in big litigation and Optus loses its lawyers 2 years in

April 22nd, 2007 · 2 Comments

Asia Pacific Telecommunications Ltd v Optus Networks Pty Ltd [2007] NSWSC 350 is a decision with wonderfully appalling facts. In the rush to agree consent orders before a directions hearing one morning, a megafirm sent a document to the other side which handed proof on a platter of a flagrant breach of a Chinese [...]

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Tags: Ethics · conflicts · current client and past client · duties of confidentiality · duty and duty

No absolute bar in England to representing and opposing same client in two different matters

March 18th, 2007 · No Comments

Goubran shares my view that a solicitor can act for and against the one man at the same time. Just not in relation to the same thing. In fact, there is a degree of relation which makes it impermissible, and Goubran sets out the practically meaningless judicial utterances on the test for the requisite degree [...]

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Tags: Ethics · Fiduciary duties · Uncategorized · concurrent duties · conflicts · current client and past client · duties of confidentiality · duty and duty

Role of professional conduct rules in conflict of duties injunctions

March 18th, 2007 · No Comments

On the relationship of the conduct rules to injunctions to restrain lawyers acting in the face of a conflict of duties, Goubran cites some useful authorities. I have always been astonished by what I thought was the Australian courts’ universal and complete disregard in these kinds of applications to the professional conduct rules’ conflicts provisions. [...]

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Tags: Ethics · Fiduciary duties · concurrent duties · conflicts · current client and past client · duties of confidentiality · duty and duty

Finally, some scholarship on Australian lawyers’ conflicts of duties

March 17th, 2007 · 1 Comment

Finally, someone has gone a long way towards synthesising the law relating to injunctions to restrain lawyers from acting in the face of a conflict of duties. The Melbourne University Law Review article is “Conflicts of Duty: the Perennial Lawyers’ Tale — A comparative Study of the Law in England and Australia”, [2006] MULR 4. [...]

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Tags: Ethics · Fiduciary duties · concurrent duties · conflicts · current client and past client · duties of confidentiality · duty and duty