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, [...]

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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 reasonably [...]

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When I was called up for jury duty and picked as a juror, I was surprised to learn of the existence of juries of 6 in civil cases. That was of course before I was a lawyer.  Mine was a personal injuries case about an alleged back injury, but it settled, robbing me for at [...]

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To blog, you have to be able to write, type, and learn a new programme (Wordpress in my case) but there is really only one trick to blogging, and that is finding what to write about efficiently.  I rely on various sources, most of which I will keep under my hat, but the best is [...]

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I was reminded when reading Sibonna Nominees v R Legal [2009] VCAT 893 that the 60 day period after the Bureau de Spank gives a punter a ticket under s. 4.3.7 of the Legal Profession Act, 2004 to enter VCAT for adjudication of an unresolved civil complaint of the species ‘pecuniary loss dispute’ is extendable [...]

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In this post, I reproduce an extract from Justice Hoeben’s recent decision in Johnson v Trustees of the Roman Catholic Church [2009] NSWSC 309 which discusses the increasing willingness of courts (in NSW at least) to determine preliminary issues before the main trial. In this case, everything except for quantum was ordered to be [...]

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Litigation was settled for several million dollars. The release said
‘5. The plaintiffs hereby release the defendants from all claims, actions, suits, demands arising from or in any way connected with the Proceedings, the allegations contained in the Statement of Claim and of the liquidation of the third plaintiff.’
That’s the kind of release you can get [...]

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