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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For English news, I have switched from reading The Times‘s legal affairs section to The Guardian‘s.  The Times wanted me to pay to read, and I said no.  I am not a connoisseur of international newspapers, but from what I can tell, The Guardian is the best newspaper in the world, so I am happy [...]

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There is an interesting article by Ian Wheatley at (2008) 16 Journal of Law and Medicine 193.  Titled ‘The Criminalisation of Professional Misconduct Under the Health Professions Registration Act 2005 (Vic): How is a Fine of $50,000 Not Punitive?’. It compares the rights of alleged criminals and the maximum sentences in criminal law, with the [...]

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The civil procedure landscape is changing fast.  A new Evidence Act.  The establishment of the Costs Court.  The Federal Court’s rocket docket.  The Supreme Court’s Commercial Court.  The abolition of the County Court’s Practice Court in favour of a managed list approach.  Early neutral evaluation.  The increasing use of Associate Justices and Judicial Registrars. The [...]

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Readers, to ‘chuck a Hercules’ is to follow in the footsteps of Keith Hercules, solicitor, of Melbourne whose suit for defamation against the complainant in respect of the complainant’s publication of a disciplinary complaint to the Law Institute is the subject of Hercules v Phease [1994] 2 VR 411, which I noted here.  (Compare Lincoln [...]

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In Deputy Commissioner of Taxation v Law Institute of Victoria [2010] VSCA 73, the Court of Appeal unanimously overturned the trial judge’s decision in Law Institute of Victoria Limited v Deputy Commissioner of Taxation (No 2) [2009] VSC 179, which I posted about here.  I posted about round 1, before that, here.  Justice of Appeal [...]

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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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Helpfully, the government has put out a little discussion paper about its proposal for a new national legal regulator.  Turns out the proposal is for the existing regulators to keep on keeping on, rebadged as offices of the Uber-Bureau but for there to be one central number for the Uber-Bureau which will oversee everything panoptically [...]

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Kelly v Jowett [2009] NSWCA 278 is the latest wasted costs case.  The lawyers against whom the order was made had tendered against them their own intra-office memorandum: ‘Your performance in the conduct of this matter has been pathetic. Your failure, given the recent transfer of these matters, to even have the courtesy to provide [...]

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For the moment, I am taking Advanced Evidence at Melbourne University, and Goldberg v Ng [1995] HCA 39; (1995) 185 CLR 83 is on the reading guide.  As it is a case about a lawyer-client dispute, and as it not likely to be at the forefront of reading about legal professional privilege since Mann v [...]

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