On 3 March 2010 in Parramatta, Steve Mark, NSW’s Legal Services Commissioner is giving a talk on ‘Walking the Ethical Tightrope:  Balancing the Responsibilities of In-House Counsel to Key Stakeholders’.  If you would prefer to read the speech on your Ipad in the bath, click here. He would do well to include a grab from [...]

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The Acting Legal Services Commissioner, Michael McGarvie, has been appointed Legal Services Commissioner. A photo published in 2004 may be found here. The government’s press-release is mirrored here. Mr McGarvie is very much from the profession’s private practice sector, and used to the realities of dealing with punters; he was for a long time a [...]

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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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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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A former client of mine, dissatisfied with the adverse outcome in a complaint he lodged making serious allegations against a senior member of the profession has tipped me off to an own motion investigation conducted into the Bureau de Spank by the Victorian Ombudsman.  The results, reproduced below, will not assist morale at the Bureau [...]

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Update, 14 September 2009: Here are some comments made by the Commissioner to a journalist from The Australian about how her office might be remodelled, namely by giving consumers a more formal voice within her office.
Original post: Victoria’s Legal Services Commissioner, Victoria Marles, resigned today, effective 23 October 2009, to take up a position in [...]

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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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In the latest Byrne v Marles ([2009] VSC 210), Justice Beach seems to have found that any particular allegation made by a complainant may properly be characterised as both a civil and a disciplinary complaint.  If the Legal Services Commissioner receives a complaint, she must investigate it to the extent it is a disciplinary complaint [...]

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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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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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