She sent a letter to the lawyer acting for the ex-wife detailing a draft complaint to Immigration New Zealand that alleged the woman had only married him to secure permanent residency in New Zealand.
“I will suggest your client negotiate with our client to resolve the matter in an amicable way,” the lawyer wrote.
“If we do not hear from your client by the end of the week I will have no choice to help our client [sic] to prepare an affidavit for the next steps.”
The Standards Committee prosecuting the lawyer said this was akin to blackmail and was intended to compel the man’s ex-wife to settle their separation or he would make a complaint to Immigration NZ.
After the wife’s lawyer raised an objection about the threat, the woman threatened to go to the media to “protect” herself and to make a complaint to the Law Society.
“It seems you are not focusing on your client’s matters, you are focusing on sending me to the jail [sic],” she said in an email.
She then copied a Chinese-language news website into the email chain and said the wife’s lawyer’s conduct was unacceptable.
The Standards Committee said this was to discourage the firm from raising legitimate concerns about the threat she’d made.
A year later, in 2021,the lawyer was caught bringing materials into a closed-book exam for lawyers wanting to supervise trust accounts.
She admitted her offending after she was caught and said that she deeply regretted not following the rules.
The Law Society this year notified its members that it would be changing the rules of the Trust Account Supervisor exam come July to stop people repeatedly sitting it until they passed as well, as requiring they sit the test in front of Law Society personnel.
At today’s hearing to decide penalty the woman’s lawyer, Ian Brookie, told the tribunal the blame for his client’s offending lay primarily at her manager’s feet.
He said the manager had already been found guilty by the tribunal in a separate hearing and fined $4500 for his role in failing to appropriately supervise his employee, who was then a junior lawyer with two years’ experience.
“We have a situation where something is not working as it should and it’s a system that has failed her,” Brookie said.
“She sent an email that was wrong and she breached the rule. But is that surprising for a lawyer who is trying to do the best for her clients?”
Brookie said it was an unsurprising and understandable breach by an inexperienced young lawyer who was thrust into a situation by her supervisor where she was out of her depth.
Much of today’s hearing concerned the woman’s fight to retain name suppression and Brookie gave evidence that his client’s current employer would fire her if she was named.
“Google will be there to haunt her,” Brookie said
“You made a mistake and are going to be branded for it - that’s the message it will send.”
Brookie said that for his client to lose name suppression would go against the rehabilitative approach the tribunal had signalled it would be in favour of in terms of a penalty.
“You’re not going to be struck off or suspended,” the tribunal’s chair John Adams assured the lawyer at the conclusion of today’s hearing.
“Our job is not to hurt people more than is necessary.”
However, Adams said the tribunal’s panel wouldn’t add much weight to the employer’s threat to fire the lawyer should she lose name suppression.
Counsel for the Standards Committee, Paul Collins, said any lawyer no matter how junior should know what blackmail is and how to avoid it.
“She was no greenhorn,” he said.
“Any lawyer should know that that conduct would offend the role of the lawyer … it’s not just about there being a rule about it.”
Collins said the tribunal was also well-placed to decide whether the lawyer should be able to go off and practise on her own - though usually this decision was made by a separate committee - and submitted that she should not be allowed to.
“This is a practitioner who has a long way to go to be sufficiently mature and independent before she should be permitted to practise on her own account,” he said.
The tribunal reserved its decision in respect of penalty.
