Stephen Warne on professional negligence, regulation and discipline around the world

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Entries Tagged as 'Professional regulation'

Commissioner’s obligation to charge dishonesty if he intends to allege it

December 4th, 2009 · No Comments

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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Tags: Discipline · Ethics · Legal Profession Act · Legal Services Commissioner · Misconduct · Practising certificates · Professional regulation · Striking off · Trust money · amendment · appeals · concurrent duties · conflicts · current client and past client · duty and duty · jurisdiction · natural justice · procedure · trust monies · wilful disregard for rules

States’ and territories’ disciplinary systems summarised by the government

November 17th, 2009 · No Comments

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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Tags: Professional regulation

Latest on claims for the other side’s lawyers to pay your costs personally instead of their client

November 8th, 2009 · No Comments

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 Hamad [...]

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Tags: Party party costs · Professional regulation · Wasted costs

How would Goldberg v Ng be decided today?

October 15th, 2009 · No Comments

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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Tags: Client Legal Privilege · Professional regulation

Ombudsman carries out own-motion investigation of Legal Services Commissioner

September 22nd, 2009 · 2 Comments

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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Tags: Client Legal Privilege · Discipline · Judges · Legal Profession Act · Legal Services Commissioner · Professional regulation

New national lawyer regulation working group website up

August 26th, 2009 · No Comments

Australia’s National Legal Profession Reform Project has a website up and running.

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Tags: Professional regulation

New complaints system for English solicitors

August 26th, 2009 · No Comments

English firm Weightmans has a little article about the newly formed Office for Legal Complaints’s first discussion paper about the Ombudsman scheme the OLC proposes to establish by 2010.

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Tags: Discipline · Professional regulation · regulators' duties

Sex offence doctor’s VCAT success stayed pending appeal

August 4th, 2009 · No Comments

The Herald Sun has been active recently with front page excoriation of VCAT’s professional regulatory review jurisdiction for letting loose on the public again those they have described in unusually large letters as ‘sex fiends’ and ‘insane killers‘.  The two decisions are SL v Medical Practitioners Board of Victoria [2008] VCAT 2077, a decision of [...]

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Tags: Admission · Criminal liability · Professional regulation · VCAT · doctors

Protected: How to deal with a Legal Services Commissioner complaint

July 14th, 2009 · Enter your password to view comments

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

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Tags: Professional fees and disbursements · Professional regulation · VCAT · Vic Solis' Conduct Rules · costs disclosure defaults · costs disputes

Restraints on use of information obtained by compulsion

June 2nd, 2009 · No Comments

The rule in Home Office v Harman governs the use of documents and information obtained by people generally by various forms of compulsion in litigation: the court rules about interrogatories (a form of statute), Court orders for discovery, witness statements served pursuant to an order to do so.  But when I carefully checked this point [...]

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Tags: Legal Services Commissioner · Professional regulation · duties of confidentiality · regulators' duties