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Citing mental and physical health struggles, a Queensland lawyer ignored repeated notices from the Legal Services Commissioner regarding an investigation into her firm’s alleged failure to meet tax, superannuation, and trust accounting obligations.
The Queensland lawyer’s six-month failure to respond to correspondence and requests from the Legal Services Commissioner warranted both a public reprimand and a fine of $10,000, the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal (QCAT) determined.
The lawyer also conceded to a finding of professional misconduct.
The first notice, sent by both email and post in June and July 2024, advised the lawyer that the commissioner had resolved to commence an investigation into alleged financial and tax failures of her law firm.
In one of the other four notices sent over the next six months, the lawyer was alerted to a concern regarding $300,000 in trust funds.
The commissioner did not receive a response until December, in which the lawyer informed them that a personal tax debt had been discharged, her practice was listed for sale, a significant amount of super was repaid, and she did not intend to continue to practise law.
While she said she remembered receiving the first notice, the lawyer told the commissioner it was in her “too hard basket” and she believed her co-director and husband would “sort it out”.
QCAT was told the lawyer had been hospitalised in June 2024 after falling from her horse. A suggestion from medical professionals that she give up horse riding – which dashed her dreams of representing Australia at the LA Paralympics in 2028 – had impacted on her mental health.
The lawyer was already working reduced hours at her law firm, having suffered a serious road accident in 2012 that resulted in her enduring more than 30 surgeries and procedures in the years since.
By the time the first notice was sent, the lawyer said she was “simply unable to engage with the [Legal Services Commissioner] and even contemplate making a response or seeking assistance”.
While her physical and mental health provided “something of an explanation”, QCAT’s Justice Paul Freeburn – together with panel members Petrina Macpherson and Dr Julian Lamont – found it still to be a “serious breach of [her] professional responsibilities”.
Given that much of the regulation of the profession is contingent on complaints, Justice Freeburn said there will be a “necessarily retrospective element” to an inquiry made by a regulator.
By delaying response, the regulator “cannot take proper steps, for example, to secure trust money, or to take steps to ensure that the practitioner is complying with their professional obligations”. This is so even when the complaint is baseless or unnecessary.
“That practical concern, as well as the public confidence rationale … mean it is essential that practitioners promptly and properly cooperate with the regulator,” Justice Freeburn said.
“A failure by a practitioner to do so treats the disciplinary regime with a lack of respect and would ordinarily justify removal from the roll.”
In determining whether to impose the $10,000 fine, Justice Freeburn said a public reprimand on its own “would not sufficiently fulfil the objectives of protecting the public by enforcing standards upon which the public can rely and deterring other practitioners from engaging in similar conduct”.
