A Queensland solicitor has been removed from the roll of practitioners and ordered to pay legal costs after the state’s civil and administrative tribunal found he had engaged in nine instances of professional misconduct, including trust account failures, conflicts of interest and providing misleading information to authorities.
The Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal considered nine allegations of professional misconduct made against a legal practice director, centred around fundamental deficiencies in competent practice management.1
The initial discipline application against the sole legal practitioner and director was brought by the Legal Services Commissioner in 2024, arising from several matters that occurred between 2018 and 2020.2
The respondent solicitor’s conduct was ‘bundled up’ into four overarching categories by the Tribunal, including issues with trust account management, acting twice in a conflict of interest, providing false or misleading information to the Queensland Law Society and failing to pay his employees’ superannuation contributions.3
The Commissioner noted the range of charges were grounded in the solicitor’s overall failure to implement appropriate management systems across his practice – for instance, a lack of high-level responsibility in managing the firm’s trust accounts, delegated to a non-legal practitioner, allowed for irregularities in records and deficiencies caused by unauthorised withdrawals.4
Opting not to contest the charges or their characterisation, the solicitor accepted in a joint statement of agreed facts that all nine charges amounted to professional misconduct, necessitating his removal from the local roll of legal practitioners.5
The relevant question set before the Tribunal was therefore whether the respondent solicitor ought to pay the Commissioner’s costs of the discipline application.6
Section 462(1) of the Legal Profession Act 2007 provides that a solicitor found to have engaged in professional misconduct must pay legal costs, including those incurred by the Commissioner, but makes an exception if a disciplinary body is satisfied ‘exceptional circumstances’ exist.7 It was this qualifier the respondent solicitor relied on in submitting that his situation justified a departure from a standard disciplinary costs order.8
He first highlighted that his lengthy legal career had been without incident until the alleged misconduct, after which he had stepped back from the law altogether. Reiterated by the solicitor was his ‘early cooperation’ with the regulatory body, as he had immediately acceded to the charges, their classification as professional misconduct and the consequence of being removed from the roll. He lastly pointed to his limited financial means, having been declared bankrupt in February 2024.9
In assessing whether the respondent’s circumstances were exceptional according to s 462(1) LPA, the Tribunal returned to Chief Justice Bowskill’s observation in Pennisi v Legal Services Commissioner10 that what constitutes ‘exceptional circumstances’ requires a qualitative assessment, assessed according to the facts of the particular case.11
While acknowledging the inherent difficulty in approximating a definition of the term, the Tribunal referred to the description provided by Lord Bingham in R v Kelly,12 adopted in the more recent decision of Legal Services v Sheehan:13
We must construe ‘exceptional’ as an ordinary, familiar English adjective and not as a term of art. It describes a circumstance which is such as to form an exception which is out of the ordinary [indistinct] or unusual or special or uncommon. To be exceptional, a circumstance need not be unique or unprecedented or very rare, but it cannot be one that is regularly or routinely or normally encountered.14
The Tribunal ultimately concluded that the respondent solicitor’s circumstances did not meet the above threshold, and were therefore insufficient to relieve him of an adverse costs order.15 It was noted that there are indeed benefits for practitioners who cooperate with disciplinary applications from an early stage, and that bankruptcy alone has not historically been held to constitute exceptional circumstances.16
Having found the solicitor had engaged in nine counts of professional misconduct, the Tribunal ordered his name be removed from the local roll and that he pay the Commissioner’s costs.17
Footnotes
1 Legal Services Commissioner v Palermo [2026] QCAT 40.
2 Ibid [2].
3 Ibid [5]–[8].
4 Ibid [12].
5 Ibid [3].
6 Ibid [27].
7 Legal Profession Act 2007 (Qld) s 462(1) (‘LPA’).
8 Legal Services Commissioner v Palermo (n 1) [30].
9 Ibid [30]
10 [2023] QCA 234 (‘Pennisi’).
11 Ibid [57].
12 [2000] QB 198.
13 [2025] QCAT 81.
14 R v Kelly (n 12) 208.
15 Legal Services Commissioner v Palermo (n 1) [42].
16 Rigley [2025] QCAT 526.
17 Legal Services Commissioner v Palermo (n 1) [26], [30], [42].
Share this article