Family Court lawyer Paulette Main has been struck off.
A disgraced Tauranga lawyer who fraudulently claimed nearly $375,000 from a legal support scheme has been struck off.
Paulette Main didn’t appear at the Lawyers and Conveyancers Disciplinary Tribunal (LCDT) hearing where her professional fate was decided, but she wrote a letter.
In it she said she understood she would be struck off, and accepted that.
She is currently serving a three-year prison sentence.
The tribunal found the “only viable response” was to strike her off the roll of barristers and solicitors, and made an order for costs and disbursements, as sought by the Standards Committee.
This means she will not be able to hold a practising certificate or practise law in New Zealand.
Main was convicted in the Tauranga District Court in October last year, after admitting a representative charge of obtaining by deception, and one representative charge of obstructing the SFO’s investigation.
She was charged in 2023, and had planned to defend the charges.
The obstruction charge related to Main’s failure to respond to requests for information when the SFO was undergoing its investigation.
After Judge Melinda Mason sentenced her to three years’ imprisonment, Main’s lawyer, Tony Rickard-Simms, immediately indicated his client would appeal.
That appeal has yet to be heard in the High Court.
According to a summary of facts, referred to at sentencing, Main changed combinations of her clients’ names, varied spellings, changed dates of birth, and dates of disputes to fraudulently claim almost $375,000 from a legal support scheme.
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”.
Rickard-Simms described Main, during his submissions at sentencing, as having a “disorganised mind”.
He said 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.
He said 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.
Main had 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.
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.