On Tuesday week, the 17th, Michael McGarvie, Victoria’s somewhat-new Legal Services Commissioner (he has been Commissioner or Acting Commissioner for coming on 10 months) is going to give a talk at the Leo Cussen Institute at 5.30 p.m.  Mr McGarvie has acknowledged the need to build trust with the profession, and to reduce the extraordinary [...]

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Graymarshall Pty Ltd v Department of Environment, Climate Change & Water [2010] NSWLEC 54 is a decision of NSW’s Land and Environment Court about the application of the privilege against penalties (related to, but separate from, the privilege against self-incrimination). A regulator issued a notice compelling the production of information to a company. The statute [...]

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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 former [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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