Public reprimand for lawyer who cut sibling from father’s will

A lawyer will be reprimanded for preparing a new will for an elderly man without taking instructions from him.

The attempt by one beneficiary of an elderly man’s will to cut out another, should have set off ‘alarm bells’, a tribunal has found.

A lawyer will be publicly reprimanded for preparing a new will for a 94-year-old man without ­interviewing or taking instructions from him, acting at the ­behest of a son who stood to benefit.

Solicitor Ronald Lawson engaged in unsatisfactory professional conduct in his handling of the second will of William Herbert Brown, the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal found.

Mr Brown’s original will divided his estate among two sons, a daughter and granddaughters.

But one of his sons and a beneficiary, Graham Brown, contacted Mr Lawson in October 2013, instructing him to prepare a new will, which cut out his brother, Christopher Brown. Months earl­ier, Christopher Brown had written a two-page letter to his father, criticising him for leaving his mother in 1984, a tribunal decision says.

The second will, in removing Christopher Brown as a beneficiary, increased his siblings’ share of their father’s estate.

Mr Lawson drafted the new will and sent two employees from his law practice to Mr Brown’s nursing home, Albany Gardens, northwest of Brisbane, for his signature.

Mr Brown appeared to read it, correcting two errors including a misspelling before signing it. He died in September 2015, and separate legal proceedings were launched over the second will.

Tribunal president Martin Daubney said Mr Lawson, 75, ­received and acted on instructions “without, at any time or in any way, verifying those instructions with the testator”.

The attempt by one beneficiary to cut out another, increasing their own stake, should have set off “alarm bells” on the need for verification. “Such verification could easily have been undertaken by the simple expedient of a telephone call from the respondent,” Justice Daubney said. “In the view of the tribunal, the conduct … fell short of the standard of competence and diligence that a member of the public is entitled to expect of a reasonably competent legal practitioner.”

Noting Mr Lawson’s many years of legal practice and previously unblemished disciplinary record, Justice Daubney said the appropriate penalty was a public reprimand.