Justice Michael Lee has levelled strong criticism at Network Ten’s lawyer, Justin Quill, for “misleading” media interviews in the immediate aftermath of Bruce Lehrmann’s disastrous defamation loss.

In court on Wednesday, Justice Lee brought up the interviews when discussing whether to award Ten legal costs after it won its case against Lehrmann.

It successfully showed that on the balance of probabilities, Lehrmann raped a colleague, Brittany Higgins, in a Parliament House office in March 2019. Quill then gave interviews that criticised some of Justice Lee’s reasoning.

“Apparently, Network Ten thought it was appropriate, in the 48 hours after, to go around to say it had been vindicated in relation to all aspects of its conduct. If one reads those communications properly, that was quite misleading. I made it perfectly plain that the respondents fell well short of a standard of reasonableness in the credulous way they went about reporting,” Justice Lee said.

To do the interviews, he said, “without having taken time to read the judgment” was “quite misleading”. “There are various aspects of the conduct of Network Ten that cause me concern.”