The Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal last week recommended that an experienced criminal law practitioner be removed from the roll of Queensland practitioners due to “repeated flagrant flouting of the law”1 and disregard for the authority of the court.
In Legal Services Commissioner v Magill [2023] QCAT 134, QCAT found the practitioner guilty of professional misconduct that related to seven convictions of breach of bail conditions on six separate occasions, and unsatisfactory professional conduct through his various failures to disclose these convictions to the Law Society within seven days.
The tribunal found this conduct and his disdain for the undertakings given “fell short of, to a substantial degree, the standard of professional conduct observed or approved by members of the profession of good repute and competency”.2
The practitioner was “not deterred from flouting his bail undertakings despite obvious knowledge of them, particularly given the charge brought the day after his first undertaking, despite the seriousness of those undertakings, to which even if his experience in the law both as a solicitor and a police officer had not taught him, ought to have been brought home to him by the Chief Magistrate and later the District Court on his appeal, and despite the imposition of substantial fines…”3
The tribunal also noted that there was a complete absence of any reasonable explanation4 for his conduct.
Read the decision.
Footnotes
1 Legal Services Commissioner v Magill [2023] QCAT 134, [54].
2 Ibid [28].
3 Ibid [26].
4 Ibid [27].
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