Queensland lawyer fined for revealing emails

A Queensland lawyer has been reprimanded after sending an email to 20 friends and colleagues revealing his daughter and her former husband were parties to domestic violence and family law proceedings.

A Queensland lawyer has been reprimanded after sending an email to 20 friends and colleagues revealing his daughter and her former husband were parties to domestic violence and family law proceedings.

The email contained sensitive personal information about his daughter, who was also his client, and her former husband and their children.

The lawyer’s daughter was the subject of an application for a protection order lodged by her former husband in March 2020.

The lawyer appeared in the Wynnum Magistrates Court on behalf of his daughter and had prepared submissions to strike out the application as an abuse of process but discovered his former son-in-law had applied to withdraw the application.

The lawyer sent an email with information relating to the case to 20 people in an act he described as “reaching out”. He attached an affidavit by his daughter and the submissions he had prepared for the hearing.

The lawyer said in the email that he had a “fiery exchange” with the magistrate who would not hear his cross-application, and included a link to the magistrate’s profile.

This email was forwarded by one of the recipients to the former husband.

The lawyer described himself as having had “poor mental health” at the time, in part because of being worried about his daughter and angry at his former son-in-law’s behaviour. He was also suffering from an “oppressive workload”.

The Legal Services Commissioner filed a disciplinary application charging the lawyer with “failing to maintain reasonable standards of competence and diligence”.

The commissioner said the lawyer’s conduct should be characterised as professional misconduct rather than the lesser “unsatisfactory professional conduct”, given such disclosures could carry penalties of two years’ imprisonment.

The Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal said the lawyer had given no consideration to the effect of that conduct upon his former son-in-law or his grandchildren: “The email contained personal information about (the son-in-law) and his partner in the context of a family law dispute with considerable acrimony which could only serve to inflame the situation further.”

The tribunal described the conduct as “more in the nature of seeking to vent in respect of what he considered an injustice” and it was not intended to intimidate his former son-in-law.

It found the email in breach of the Domestic and Family Violence Protection Act 2012 and it constituted a “significant lack of professional judgment”.

It said the behaviour amounted to unsatisfactory professional conduct and the lawyer should be publicly reprimanded, pay a fine of $1500 and do a family violence education program.