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 Hamad [...]

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

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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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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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There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

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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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