This is a post about David v David [2009] NSWCA 8 (the decision at first instance is at [2007] NSWSC 855). Karl Suleman has been good to professional negligence lawyers.  He procured other Assyrians to invest in excellent sounding supermarket trolley schemes.  ‘Give me $50,000′, he said to one investor, ‘and shopping trolleys will pay [...]

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Reproduced below is a blog post about ‘bill padding’ from the US site, Legal Blog Watch. That is where lawyers say work took them longer than it really did, and so charge commensurately more, or even make up the fact that they did work, and charge for it. Sometimes I read articles like this and [...]

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On 13 August 2008, Deputy President O’Dwyer found charges of misconduct at common law made out against Kylie Minogue’s one-time solicitor, the man towards the centre of the government’s Operation Wickenby investigation, Michael Brereton. See Legal Services Commissioner v Brereton [2008] VCAT 1723. Mr O’Dwyer found he had transferred more than $2.3 million of [...]

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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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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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Update, 13 November: Clayton Utz’s take on the case here.
Here’s a long Sydney Morning Herald article about the latest big Chinese wall case, this time not in the context of a law firm, but of Citigroup, an investment bank. Here’s The Age’s shorter version. The case is ASIC v Citigroup Global Markets Australia [...]

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The Ombudsman has been looking into the performance of a regulator, MARA, the Migration Agents Registration Authority. He was critical. His press release is here, the full report here. Reproduced below are the bits about impartiality and the avoidance of conflicts of duties ‘in the case where an industry representative body is also the regulatory [...]

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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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H v Medical Practitioners Board of Victoria [2007] VCAT 526 was a rehearing of a case before the Medical Practitioners Board (the decision of which is here). VCAT, constituted by Vice President Harbison and Associate Professor Davis, reduced the severity of the outcome of an unprofessional conduct prosecution for an intimate relationship with a former [...]

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Patterson v S [1998] VLPT 11 is a decision of the Legal Profession Tribunal dealing with a sole practitioner who was the executor of a priest’s will. It held that executors’ work carried out by an executor who happens to be a solicitor is not legal work, and so fees for the work were not [...]

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