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NSW lawyer guilty of professional misconduct for practising certificate breach
A former government lawyer is awaiting disciplinary orders after being found guilty of professional misconduct for breaching conditions on her practising certificate and for failing to comply with an undertaking imposed by the Law Society for several years.
Naomi Neilson
The NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal (NCAT) will move into another hearing to determine the disciplinary orders that will be imposed on solicitor Catherine Fisher after finding she failed to complete a practice management course despite it being imposed as a condition on her practising certificate after she allowed it to lapse.
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Ms Fisher was admitted in 1999 and worked as a government lawyer in supervised legal practice from 2000 to 2010 but did not seek to engage in legal practice again until 2015. As part of her renewal and due to the practice of the Law Society to review practising certificates that have lapsed for more than five years, the licensing committee was tasked with reviewing Ms Fisher’s application.
In Ms Fisher’s case, the licensing committee allowed her to engage in unsupervised legal practice but only if she signed an undertaking agreeing to apply for the next applicable practice management course. Despite several reminders over the next few years alerting her to this undertaking, Ms Fisher failed to do so.
Ms Fisher denied that her conduct amounted to professional misconduct and while she admits that she signed the undertaking, she said it did not, on its terms, apply to her situation or “alternatively that it was impossible for her to comply with it given her individual circumstances” that prevented enrolment in the course.
Due to this, she requested that if the tribunal found her guilty of either professional misconduct or unsatisfactory professional conduct, exceptional circumstances exist that would mean she should not have to pay the Law Society’s costs.
In a November 2016 response to the Law Society – despite a deadline for reply set a month earlier – Ms Fisher said that she was unable to secure a place in any course sessions because they were full, and the next available session was in 2017. Ms Fisher did not apply for renewal of her practising certificate for 2017/18.
In her submissions, Ms Fisher also stated that she had endeavoured to comply with the undertaking but was “unable to secure a place in 2016”. She added that she could not attend the next available course, in the first half of 2017, due to hospitalisation, feeling financially unable and her visits to remote areas.
She also told the Law Society that she did not believe the undertaking was applicable to her because she was not practising and apologised for the oversight.
More to come.
The judgement can be found on AustLII: Council of the Law Society of New South Wales v Fisher [2021] NSWCATOD 73 (31 May 2021).
