In response to the serious charges against Wong, the Lawyers and Conveyancers Disciplinary Tribunal has suspended him from the roll of barristers and solicitors, pending a full hearing.
It’s a rare move for the tribunal to suspend a lawyer before the charges have been fully investigated and it only does this when the most serious of allegations are levelled against a lawyer.
The tribunal did this recently with Alwyn O’Connor, who was found to have lied to the tribunal about taking $150,000 from a client’s account while they were in prison, and with Aaron Nicholls, who was unable to explain where $700,000 of his client’s money had disappeared to.
According to the charges before the tribunal. Wong was acting for a client as they attempted to recover a debt from another person in 2022 through both the District and High Courts.
However, Wong allegedly strung his client along for a year about the progress of his case, creating false documents to justify the expenses and filing fees he was charging the client.
“No date yet, but I have sent the Court a follow-up this morning regarding this. Hopefully it’s just a delay with the post,” Wong told his client by email in July after they inquired about how matters were progressing.
Then in August, Wong told his client over the phone that matters were under case management at the High Court and then gave him copies of submissions purportedly filed by opposing counsel, as well as file numbers he’d allegedly fabricated.
“I’ll be looking into this a bit more today as it has been a bit of a joke with the court system. I’ll be in touch shortly,” Wong told his client in February 2023, a year after taking the case on.
Later the same month, following persistent unanswered questions from his client, Wong forwarded him a minute supposedly written by Judge Raymond Marshall stating: “I make orders to grant leave to discontinue proceedings.”
Both the District and High Court confirmed that Wong had not filed proceedings with either court.
Counsel for the standards committee pressing charges on behalf of the Law Society, Paul Collins, told the tribunal that Wong was a “peril to the public”.
Collins said there was evidence of Wong’s “widespread and egregious dishonesty” in regards to his client’s file and his “persistent denial and unwillingness to realistically address the evidence against him”.
Wong has since left the firms from where the alleged conduct occurred and his new employer is aware of the charges against him and is carefully supervising him.
However, the tribunal was concerned that this wasn’t enough.
“The alleged wrongdoing occurred over an extensive period of time [and] involved many acts, including deliberate manufacturing of false documents. His deceit to his client is fairly termed ‘egregious’,” the tribunal said.
“On an assessment of his character as evidenced by the material currently available, we find that Mr Wong cannot be trusted to behave in an honest manner consonant with his duties to client or court.”
Wong declined to comment.
Jeremy Wilkinson is an Open Justice reporter based in Manawatū covering courts and justice issues with an interest in tribunals. He has been a journalist for nearly a decade and has worked for NZME since 2022.
