Legal Ethics

The Victorian Legal Services Board and Commissioner has suspended wealth guru Dominique Grubisa’s law licence, saying she is “not entitled to engage in legal practice anywhere in Australia” and could face further regulatory action.

An appeals court has overturned a decision banning a lawyer from practice with retrospective effect and ordering her to pay $20,000 in legal costs, after a tribunal sanctioned her for allegedly misleading a court employee and making “offensive” remarks in 2016.

A lawyer who failed to pay $23,000 in fees to senior counsel and made a groundless complaint to the bar association to use as a “bargaining chip” engaged in professional misconduct, a tribunal has found.

The state of Queensland has brought a “hopeless” defence in a $2.5 million suit alleging a Federal Circuit judge unlawfully imprisoned a Queensland man for contempt after he failed to comply with an order for particulars, a court has heard.

Ramsay Health Care Australia has been let off the hook for using emails subpoenaed in a defamation case between two feuding surgeons at one of its hospitals, with a judge accepting that an in-house lawyer was “mortified” by her mistake and was “drowning in work” at the time.

A Perth solicitor has been reprimanded and ordered to pay a $24,000 fine after a tribunal found he had engaged in unsatisfactory professional conduct for pursuing a case that was “doomed to fail”.

A law firm that recouped two-thirds of a personal injury payout in excess of the statutory cap through a “potentially misleading” costs agreement will pay back a former client $26,200 plus interest.

Former attorney-general Christian Porter has told the Full Court that silk Sue Chrysanthou had to act for him in his defamation action against the ABC over an article airing historical rape allegations, saying she could not refuse the brief simply because a friend of his rape accuser “wishes him ill”.

Former Atanaskovic Hartnell lawyer Brody Clarke has had his name removed from the roll after the NSW Court of Appeal found he engaged in “dishonourable and disgraceful” conduct in stealing almost $10 million from a single client to feed his online gambling addiction.

A NSW barrister who continued to practice in local courts without a valid certificate has received a suspended prison sentence for criminal contempt, after a judge found the prospect of imprisonment was “the last remaining means of deterring him from contravening court orders.”