Lawyer struck off after taking $200k of client funds to escape abusive relationship

RNZ News

2 days ago

By Jeremy Wilkinson, Open Justice reporter of
The woman said she lived in constant fear of her husband.
Photo:
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A lawyer who says she feared for her life at the hands of an abusive husband took at least $200,000 from her clients, partly to escape the relationship.
"I understand how on the face this looks like a simple story of a lawyer who misused client funds," she told a disciplinary tribunal today, "but, this is a story of a long shadow of domestic violence".
The woman, who has name suppression, said she and her children were in a state of survival for seven years.
She said they lived in constant fear of her husband and often had to barricade themselves in a bedroom so he wouldn't hurt them.
"The term survival mode does not do justice to the psychological toll," she said.
"I genuinely believe we would have ended up as a news headline for a murder suicide."
Despite the abuse, the woman continued to operate a successful legal practice, but began dipping into her firm's trust account so she could move cities to escape her husband.
Today, the woman told the Lawyers and Conveyancers Disciplinary Tribunal that taking money from the account, which is used to hold client funds, began as an error.
But, she then started taking more in the belief she could repay it.
The woman told the tribunal that she accepted she would be struck off for taking the money, some of which she has already repaid, and realises now that she should have shut her firm down when she couldn't cope.
"But I loved being a lawyer.
"In all the darkness, it was the one thing I was holding onto that made me feel like me."
She knew it was wrong
Milan Djurich, counsel for the Standards Committee laying charges against the woman on behalf of the New Zealand Law Society, told the tribunal that the woman knew what she was doing was wrong.
"It was a high level of theft and a breach of professional standards," he said.
According to the charges against the woman, it was one of her clients who contacted the Law Society in 2023, concerned about the lack of contact from the woman after they'd paid a significant deposit.
Investigators estimated that there was a shortfall of at least $200,000 in the trust account before taking control of it in December 2023.
It was found the woman transferred money out of the trust account and spent it on things like insurance, gym fees, relocation costs, school fees and books and payments on a deposit for a property she'd purchased.
There were also several large transfers into her personal accounts, but it's unclear exactly what that money was spent on.
The woman's lawyer, Stewart Sluis, said his client didn't have access to the trust account any longer as the Law Society took it over, and she now couldn't determine exactly how much she took, but the Standards Committee accepted that the shortfall was at least $203,000.
The woman, who handed in her practising certificate voluntarily, accepted she would be struck from the roll of barristers and solicitors.
The woman has recently won a relationship property settlement in the Family Court against her ex-husband.
She now plans to use the proceeds to pay the rest of the money she took from her clients.
While the woman was granted name suppression, she asked the tribunal to include the context of why she took the money in its written decision.
Because the Family Court is strictly suppressed, if she had lost name suppression, the wider context about her husband could not have been referenced by the tribunal, nor reported by NZME.
"This is my attempt to tell my side of the story, one shaped by domestic violence and a mental state shattered by fear," she said.
"I hope that sharing this story may help other women in the future."
The tribunal ordered that the woman be struck off and that she pay legal costs as well as repay the money that was taken from her clients.
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This story originally appeared in the
New Zealand Herald
.
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