Mr Burmingham is the subject of three posts already.  They dealt with three discrete aspects of his case, Maurice B Pty Ltd v Burmingham [2009] VSC 20: a titillating detail, advocates’ immunity, and the nature of the suit for fees.  But his case was really mostly about what happens when a no-win no-fee costs agreement [...]

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One might imagine the suit for fees to be the simplest legal claim there is.  But there seems to be great confusion about what the elements of the claim are,  what defences are available, and the relationship of the suit with a taxation, or the failure to exercise a right of taxation. If anyone has [...]

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Imagine this.  A beneficiary thinks a trustee is diminshing the trust estate by spending too much on lawyers. They have no standing to seek a taxation of the trustee’s solicitor’s bill, and the trustee’s solicitor’s file is unavailable to them by virtue of legal professional privilege enjoyed by the trustee.  The beneficiary has no contractual [...]

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Legal Services Commissioner v JDG [2008] LPT 17 is a shocking case in which a Queensland barrister was struck off after he lied when confronted by investigators with the true proposition that he had offered to pay a $50,000 bribe to a Magistrate or Crown prosecutor on behalf of a client.  He also took $59,000 [...]

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Update: More solicitors’ lien cases: Magnamain Investments Pty Ltd v Baker Johnson Lawyers [2008] QSC 245, and Stark v Dennett [2007] QSC 171, a case about who should be taken to have terminated the retainer and which sets out the law thoroughly.

Original post: As I have already noted in these pages, Issac B was [...]

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This post has been sitting around as a draft waiting to be finished.  There is little chance of that for a long time.  So here is my incomplete annotation to s. 103 of the Legal Practice Act, 1996.  That is the provision which gives VCAT (formerly the Legal Profession Tribunal) jurisdiction to set aside costs [...]

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Nicholson v B&S [2000] VLPT 28 was the first decision to deal in detail with the principles which govern the extremely wide discretions granted by s. 103 of the old Legal Practice Act, 1996. Registrar Howell cancelled a costs agreement, and ordered that one of the bills the client challenged — the only one she [...]

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Reproduced below is a blog post about ‘bill padding’ from the US site, Legal Blog Watch. That is where lawyers say work took them longer than it really did, and so charge commensurately more, or even make up the fact that they did work, and charge for it. Sometimes I read articles like this and [...]

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In a long-wnded way, I tentatively suggest that, so long as the applicant has the sense to invoke s. 108 of the Fair Trading Act, 1999, then penalty interest is available under the Supreme Court Act, 1986, just like in the Supreme Court, so long as the dispute is a consumer-trader dispute. That is, a [...]

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Solicitors who are parties to litigation and don’t hire other solicitors to represent them are the only people who are generally entitled to claim legal costs from the losing party even though they don’t have to pay lawyers anything. Engaging in litigation involving themselves is therefore a profitable activity if they win. The [...]

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