Former Family Court lawyer Paulette Main has been imprisoned for three years after falsely claiming nearly $375,000 from a Ministry of Justice scheme.
A lawyer changed combinations of her client’s names, varied spellings, changed dates of birth, and dates of disputes to fraudulently claim almost $375,000 from a legal support scheme.
Today, Paulette Main was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment when she appeared in the Tauranga District Court.
But immediately after her sentence was handed down, her lawyer indicated he had instructions to appeal and sought bail.
Judge Melinda Mason declined bail, stating Main needed to start serving her sentence.
Main was working as a Family Court lawyer in Tauranga when she made more than 1200 false claims in relation to 26 clients to the Ministry of Justice’s Family Legal Advice Service (FLAS) between December 2017 and July 2022.
The scheme, which sits under the legal aid umbrella, was meant to allow for two discrete claims per client, within a one-year dispute period, to give out-of-court advice in Care of Children Act matters.
It’s intended to assist parties in resolving their disputes without court intervention, with lawyers claiming a fixed fee from the ministry.
Main would use details for people who’d previously been her clients, but had never heard of the FLAS scheme.
Many of those clients had obtained Main’s contact details through Women’s Refuge, where she advertised her services.
One former client’s details were used for 247 claims, and Main obtained $72,444.25 from the ministry for claims in his name.
While most had been former clients, there were some people, for whom false claims were made, who she had never acted for, but they’d been involved in a dispute where Main had acted for another party, or as a lawyer for a child.
This meant she had access to their details, which she then used for the false FLAS claim.
One woman who Main claimed services for said that, in early 2020, she was “desperate for legal guidance”, and connected with Main while trying to get the care of her granddaughter.
She met with Main at a cafe and had some discussions about the issue.
Later, she learned her details had been used, including the names of people connected to her, whom she’d never mentioned to Main, and who had never met Main.
It had been “incredibly distressing” to learn that her name, her granddaughter’s name, and her granddaughter’s deceased paternal grandmother’s name had all been used for fraudulent claims.
She had approached Main in “good faith during a vulnerable time”, and this had been a “betrayal of trust”.
Another client whose details were used illegitimately remained supportive of Main, saying that without her help, he wouldn’t have had appropriate access to his children.
Defence lawyer Tony Rickard-Simms described Main as having a “disorganised mind”.
He submitted that she had suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car accident in 1994, which claimed the life of her best friend, and had left her with unresolved issues related to her mental state.
Rickard-Simms said that while working as a lawyer, there had been occasions where Main acted in court hearings and afterwards struggled to remember what had happened.
He said she would attend court, and then wonder what she had just said and done.
Rickard-Simms said it was “pretty clear that there are some concerns about her mental health and welfare”.
He said that during the time of her offending, she was “putting in invoices for things she had done, and things she hadn’t done”.
He referred to clients who’d remained supportive of her and the hard work she’d done as a Family Court lawyer, but he said she accepted her life as a lawyer was now behind her.
“She has sensibly recognised she can’t renew her practising certificate,” Rickard-Simms said.
He said that while she may have taken an average of about $70,000 per year, over four-and-a-half years, she hadn’t spent it “frivolously”.
He pointed to issues she’d had with her finances, and said on occasions she’d struggled to get her owed payments for legitimate work she’d done through legal aid.
There was no suggestion that the money obtained fraudulently had been used “for anything other than to survive for their family”.
He compared this with other cases that had involved using money for “gambling sprees” or “overseas trips” and said nothing of that sort was happening in Main’s case.
Crown prosecutor Michael Thomas said a key aggravating feature of Main’s offending was the breach of trust, given her position as a lawyer and as an approved provider for the Ministry of Justice scheme.
He also noted it was premeditated, repeated offending over a lengthy period.
Main sought a discharge without conviction, but Judge Mason did not assess the consequences of a conviction as being out of all proportion to the gravity of the offending.
Judge Mason noted Main’s lack of remorse and shame over her actions.
While accepting that Family Court lawyers worked under very trying circumstances, and Main had done some good work in her career previously, that did “not justify stealing”.
In Judge Mason’s view, dishonesty was “extra serious” when someone was a lawyer and an officer of the court.
The only mitigating feature was Main’s accepted mental health issues, although they had not been assessed as being causative of her offending.
Judge Mason declined the application for a discharge without conviction and adopted a starting point of four years’ imprisonment.
She gave Main a 10% discount for her guilty plea, 10% for mental health issues, and 7.5% for the impact her incarceration would have on her dependent son.
That led to an end sentence of three years’ imprisonment, which Main has indicated she intends to appeal.
Main was charged in 2023, and initially planned to defend the charges.
However, on April 1, she entered guilty pleas to one representative charge of obtaining by deception and one representative charge of obstructing the SFO’s investigation.
The obstruction charge related to Main’s failure to respond to requests for information when the SFO was undergoing its investigation.
Hannah Bartlett is a Tauranga-based Open Justice reporter at NZME. She previously covered court and local government for the Nelson Mail, and before that was a radio reporter at Newstalk ZB.