A lawyer tried to act as her own secret witness in a Family Court case to help a friend obtain urgent custody of his child.
It’s the second time Lynette O’Boyle has become “over-involved” in a case after being suspended from practice for sending letters to the government employer of her client’s ex-partner claiming they were hacking social media accounts.
Those claims were found to have been completely unfounded and designed to damage the reputation of her client’s ex after they lost day-to-day care of their children.
Now, in similar circumstances, O’Boyle has again been found by the Lawyers and Conveyancers Disciplinary Tribunal to have crossed the line by attempting to help a friend gain custody of their child.
According to the charges released to NZME, the Whāngarei-based lawyer was working for a client who was attempting to get custody of his 8-year-old daughter, who had disclosed to him and her grandfather that her mother would sometimes hit her with a wooden spoon.
In January 2021, O’Boyle was at a barbecue with her client and his daughter, where the girl also disclosed the same information.
Following this, O’Boyle lodged an application with the Family Court for her client to obtain full custody of his daughter. As part of this filing, she drafted affidavits from her client, the girl’s grandfather and an unnamed “friend” of the family, all stating that the girl had told them she was being hit.
The affidavit from the unnamed friend was in fact O’Boyle, who was effectively trying to act as her own secret witness in the case.
Opposing counsel asked for the identity of the unnamed friend and O’Boyle refused to disclose it.
This prompted a complaint to the New Zealand Law Society, which asked similar questions about the identity of the person who had written the affidavit. O’Boyle refused to provide its investigators with the person’s identity.
“By referring to herself in the documents, she was, at best, reckless about whether she may be called to give evidence,” the tribunal said in a decision released today.
“Her conduct displayed her partisanship (lack of objectivity) in the matter.”
The tribunal went on to describe O’Boyle’s conduct as “wrongheaded and reckless”, and her previous appearances before the tribunal indicated a pattern of professional shortcomings.
“Against the background of her disciplinary record, we do not think she is suited to family law, which carries risks for lawyers who are susceptible to becoming over-involved with clients or cases and lose sight of their professional boundaries,” the ruling reads.
O’Boyle’s conduct occurred just three months before another tribunal hearing in 2021 where she was found guilty of misconduct and suspended from practice – which she later successfully appealed.
In that case, O’Boyle sent letters to the employer of the ex-partner, to the employer of the ex-partner’s partner, and to another employer and copied them to the Privacy Commissioner saying they had hacked into her client’s social media account and her own computer.
O’Boyle repeatedly told Law Society investigators that some of her allegations were borne out by evidence in the Family Court case.
The tribunal said while it accepted the fact that lawyers could sometimes make honest mistakes, what distinguished her case was the intent to harm the opposing self-represented party in an unrelated sphere.
“The lie, the wilful or reckless extent of allegations and inferences, the scattergun of toxic material, the reckless failure to check material or question her own sources before going on such a strong attack, support this,” that ruling stated.
As a result of her latest disciplinary finding, O’Boyle was ordered to pay a combined $20,000 in legal costs and fines.
She was also prohibited from practising on her own account, meaning she cannot work without supervision from another lawyer, and was issued a formal censure.
O’Boyle did not respond to a request for 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.