Tweet A warm welcome to the blogosphere for the Queensland Law Society’s Ethics Blog, which is in its first posts, but attracts an impressive callibre of comments.  The blog has a post about a recent, rare, decision about those rules about what to do in litigation if you discover your client is lying, or you [...]

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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 [...]

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Tweet In Cleveland Investments Global Ltd v Evans [2010] NSWSC 567, Justice Ward reviewed the authorities spinning off Spincode Pty Ltd v Look Software Pty Ltd [2001] VSCA 248; (2001) 4 VR 501, in which Justice of Appeal Brooking set out his views in relation to the ‘duty of loyalty’ as a grounds for restraining [...]

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Tweet Robin Tampoe, the former Gold Coast lawyer hired as one of Schapelle Corby’s lawyers by Ron Bakir, has been struck off the roll of solicitors by Queensland’s Legal Practice Tribunal. The decision is here.  Removal from the roll is the ultimate sanction in the world of professional discipline, though in circumstances where it is [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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Tweet The Times has an article about a solicitor on the Board of the English legal regulator and former president of the Law Society who, rather embarrassingly, had a conflict of interest determination go against him after a disciplinary investigation.  The solicitor acted pro bono for a barrister who was being sued by an Exxon [...]

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Tweet It has never been clear to me that anyone was entitled in a disciplinary prosecution to refer to statements made ‘without prejudice’ unless the joint privilege holders (the disputants on whose behalf the communication was made, and made to) waived it.  Now I have found an authority on the question in Legal Practitioners Complaints [...]

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Tweet I reckon Dr Desiatnik is unlucky with the timing of his texts.  The first edition of Legal Professional Privilege in Australia was finished when the High Court changed the test for the privilege from a sole purpose to dominant purpose and restated the law of implied waiver.  I have always shuddered about the story [...]

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Tweet I have previously expressed my disquiet about the Western Australian QC who told the Australian media that Schapelle Corby’s lawyers were trying to bribe the judges hearing her case.  It seems the Bureau de Spanque de l’Australie de l’Ouest had in fact got right onto it, initiating an own motion investigation. The resultant prosecution [...]

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