An Ipswich principal has been fined $4000 and will be publicly reprimanded for displaying a lack of competence and diligence in a family law matter.
Gregory John Ploetz, director at MA Kent Solicitors, was found to have engaged in unsatisfactory professional conduct in 2020 by the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal (QCAT) last week.
In her decision published yesterday, QCAT President Justice Mellifont also ordered Mr Ploetz to complete a Queensland Law Society Legal Ethics Course and pay the Legal Services Commission’s (LSC) costs.
The LSC’s discipline application alleged that between March 2020 and October 2020, while acting for a father in a parenting matter, the sole practitioner failed to start or advance the proceedings and did not address various requests from the father for updates.
It alleged that in doing so, Mr Ploetz failed to meet or maintain a reasonable standard of competence or diligence.
The practitioner was engaged by the client who was in a parenting dispute with the mother of his three-year-old daughter, who had relocated to Sydney from Queensland with the child a month after she was born in 2017.
A Family Dispute Resolution Conference had been scheduled for December 2019, following a Legal Aid Queensland (LAQ) grant. The mother failed to attend, then stopped contact with the client in February 2020.
A month later, LAQ extended the grant to begin parenting proceedings in the Federal Circuit and Family Court for the client to have access or contact with his daughter.
The client sent multiple emails and made several visits to MA Kent Solicitors for updates on his case over the next seven months. Updates were never provided despite assurances they would be. LAQ intervened in October 2020, after Mr Ploetz failed to begin parenting proceedings.
QCAT found Mr Ploetz did not make adequate attempts to locate the mother for the purpose of the proceedings, or to start the proceedings, or to respond to the client’s emails, phone calls and visits in the period of more than seven months since the grant of Legal Aid.
It found this was unsatisfactory given that the case involved a young child whose exact whereabouts were unknown, that the client was suffering anxiety at not having contact with his child, and that Mr Ploetz had received plenty of reminders from his client and LAQ of the need to advance the matter.
In determining sanction, QCAT considered that the 66-year-old had practised for 43 years without adverse disciplinary findings, that he had continued to work without apparent issue since the conduct, and that the failures did not extend beyond one client.
However, the fact the client was not personally out of pocket as a result of the conduct did not help Mr Ploetz, it found.
“Legal Aid clients deserve the same diligence and competence as a private paying client,” Justice Mellifont said.
“Legal Aid should be able to expect that those practitioners who undertake legally aided work do so on the basis that they will act with diligence and competence.”
QCAT accepted the parties’ submissions as to sanction, observing that the proposed orders were proportionate to Mr Ploetz’s conduct and met “the protective purpose of sanction, in particular, general deterrence, the maintenance of professional standards and to maintain public confidence in the profession”.
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