Completed projects
Survey on unsatisfactory professional conduct: A survey testing how lawyers, law students and members of the public understand and apply the concept of unsatisfactory professional conduct—a project undertaken with the support and assistance of the Griffith Law School.
The Commission’s first task, having received a complaint about the conduct of a legal practitioner and assessed it as coming within our jurisdiction, is to decide whether the conduct complained of amounts to either unsatisfactory professional conduct or worse, professional misconduct.
The Legal Profession Act 2004 does not give an exhaustive definition of the concept of unsatisfactory professional conduct but says only that it ‘includes conduct… happening in connection with the practice of law that falls short of the standard of competence and diligence that a member of the public is entitled to expect of a reasonably competent Australian legal practitioner’.
The definition invites an obvious question: What standard of competence and diligence is a member of the public entitled to expect of a reasonably competent Australian legal practitioner? The question might be obvious but the answer—as we are reminded almost every day—is not.
We thought it might be interesting and useful to find a way of putting that very question to lawyers, law students, members of the public and regulators to see what they have to say—and to see if they give the same answer. We designed a survey in conjunction with the Griffith Law School that describes sixteen fact situations or scenarios that are typical of the complaints about lawyers the Commission receives every day. The survey is very simple—it asks people who fill out the survey simply to tell us with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ for each scenario whether the practitioner’s conduct falls short of the standard of competence and diligence a member of the public is entitled to expect of a reasonably competent Australian legal practitioner.
The survey had been completed by 542 respondents as at 31 October 2006—by 238 lawyers; 212 final year law students at Griffith University and the University of Queensland; 58 members of the public and 34 staff of the regulatory authorities.
View the survey (including the results to hand at 31 October 2006) 
(83kB pdf).
Complete the survey yourself.
Read more about the Griffith Law School.
Other continuing projects (as at February 2008)
1. The Lawyers, Clients and the Business of Law Symposium Series: An ongoing partnership with the Griffith Socio-Legal Research Centre.
2. Analysis of the Commission’s complaints database: An ongoing in-house project that, among other things, seeks to identify the practitioners and practices most at risk of complaint.
3. Interactive ethical scenarios project: An ongoing partnership with the Centre for Biological Information Technology at the University of Queensland (and other project partners on a scenario by scenario basis) that is designed to give lawyers and law students opportunities to engage on-line and seek to resolve real world ethical problems arising in the course of legal practice.
4. Ethical Culture Check for Law Firms: The ethical health check for law firms is an on-line instrument that allows firms to think about their ethical culture and how well it supports the people who work within their firm to aspire to and sustain high standards of professional practice and perhaps to identify some ways in which it can be strengthened and improved.
5. Women in the Law in Queensland: An ongoing collaboration with the University of Queensland on the likelihood of complaints against female solicitors as compared to male solicitors.
Completed projects (as at February 2008)
1. Survey on unsatisfactory professional conduct: A project undertaken with the support and assistance of the Griffith Law School that tested how lawyers, law students and members of the public understand and apply the concept of unsatisfactory professional conduct to a range of factual scenarios that are typical of complaints the Commission receives every day about the conduct of lawyers.
Last updated 9/04/2008 12:23:24 PM