Legal Services Commissioner v Dempsey [2010] QCA 197 is an unsuccessful appeal from a disciplinary prosecution in which findings of dishonesty were made. Dye v Fisher Cartwright Berriman Pty Ltd [2010] NSWSC 895 is a case in which an application for a costs assessment (NSW version of taxation) outside the allotted 12 month period succeeded. [...]

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Many new decisions of interest are coming out and I will not have time to blog them any time soon as I have to go to University and concentrate on my latest and hopefully last field of study, Shareholders Rights and Remedies.  Here are some pointers in case you want to read this slew of [...]

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A recent decision of a two member panel of VCAT reiterates what has been orthodox in the Legal Practice List, and before that in the Legal Profession Tribunal: that damages for distress may be awarded in a negligence claim without the need to establish a medical condition.  Such damages may be awarded in tort notwithstanding [...]

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Update, 16 August 2010: Justice Emerton’s decision dismissing the appeal is at [2010] VSC 351. Original post: In Walsh v Croucher [2010] VSC 296, a convicted fraudster who was, at least in about the year 2000, a bald-faced, opportunistic, calculating and manipulative liar (see R v Walsh [2002] VSCA 98 and R v Walsh [2000] [...]

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In Schulman v Abbot Tout Lawyers (a firm) t/a Abbott Tout Solicitors [2010] FCA 308, a plaintiff sued his former lawyers for misleading and deceptive conduct.  At the same time as the misleading representations, which were in the nature of legal advice, were alleged to have been made by them to him, he had been [...]

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They’ve changed the law in relation to legal professional privilege on us. The common law has been abolished, at least in relation to compulsory processes (discovery, subpoenas, interrogatories, notice to produce) in fora where the new Evidence Act, 2008 applies, and the adduction of evidence in those fora. Two legal professional privilege regimes are now [...]

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Benecke v National Australia Bank (1993) 35 NSWLR 110 is one of the best known Australian cases about imputed waiver in relation to making allegations about the course of the retainer of former lawyers.  It is not, however, a case about imputed waiver in professional negligence suits against former solicitors, since this was not such [...]

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My fellow barrister Andrew Kincaid has written a useful summary of that thorny part of the law of negligence which regulates in what circumstances builders owe a duty to people who buy buildings from the original owner to avoid them suffering pure economic loss when a latent defect becomes patent. Although we (or I at [...]

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A barrister is being sued for negligence in the NSW Supreme Court. The plaintiff sought to tender an expert report of a senior counsel to the effect that a barrister of ordinary competence would have appreciated from the start that the case he had run on behalf of the plaintiff had been hopeless. Mid-trial, the [...]

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Here it is.  The abstract of the article of greatest interest is as follows: ‘When he delivered his judgment in Pritchard Joyce & Hinds v Batcup [2008] EWHC 20 (QB) Underhill J said that he had striven to avoid hindsight and had reminded himself that the central issue he had to decide was whether any [...]

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