A Queensland solicitor guilty of stealing more than $80,000 from clients over a seven-year period has been struck from the roll.
According to a decision published on the Queensland Legal Services Commission’s disciplinary register, Lance Geoffrey Rigley was found guilty of 12 charges of professional misconduct and struck from the roll.
At various points between February 2010 and December 2017, while a sole practitioner of Buck Rigley and Associates, he withdrew between $1,288.92 and $12,603.22 in excess of the legal services he provided.
By the end, Rigley had withdrawn a total of $80,683.51.
In June 2023, Rigley pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a term of three years’ imprisonment, suspended after six months.
At that time, Judge Amanda McDonnell said Rigley’s fraudulent use of trust money “was concealed to some extent by an approach which saw your record keeping, client correspondence and engagement neglected”.
In a Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal decision published last month, Rigley also accepted he withdrew $8,750 without lawful authority between February 2016 and July 2017.
He also failed to comply with notices issued by the Legal Services Commission sent between February 2018 and July 2018.
In that decision, Justice Martin Burns, practitioner panel member John Sneddon and lay panel member Dr Julian Lamont said honesty “is a fundamental and non-negotiable character attribute” for lawyers.
“Indeed, ‘conduct which undermines the trustworthiness of the practitioner, or which suggests a lack of integrity or that the practitioner cannot be trusted to deal fairly within the system which he or she practises’ is well recognised as the species of conduct most likely to result in an order recommending the removal of that practitioner’s name from the local roll,” Justice Burns and the members said.
“That likelihood will be realised in the case such as this where the conduct was not only dishonest but was persistent and protracted, involving numerous fraudulent transactions.”
Justice Burns, Sneddon, and Lamont said the Legal Profession Act 2007 (QLD) required that Rigley’s name be removed from the roll unless there was a change that he is, or would likely become, a person who is fit to be a legal practitioner.
Given Rigley did not advance any submissions to that effect, the tribunal recommended his name be removed.
The case: Legal Services Commissioner v Rigley [2025] QCAT 526.
