Folly of the DayThey Asked a Machine to Argue Their Cases. It Invented the Law, and They Filed It Without Reading It.
Every one of these people read their own filing and thought: that will do. The machine did not fail them — it gave them precisely what they asked for, which was the appearance of an argument, and they could not tell the difference because they had never been able to tell the difference. A tribunal now needs a rule compelling litigants to admit that a robot wrote the thing they signed, which is less a regulation than an epitaph.
Source: Mondaq / Fair Work Commission decisions
The WireHe Conducted an Employment Tribunal Hearing From a Moving Train, and When That Train Proved Too Noisy He Boarded a Second One.
The detail that convicts him is the second train. The first was a misjudgement; the second was a decision, taken with full knowledge of how the first had gone, by a man who had concluded that a tribunal of the United Kingdom would simply have to accommodate his itinerary. It cost him £6,800 of his own money to discover that it would not.
Source: Legal Futures
The WireA Criminal Defence Solicitor Joined a Seventeen-Man WhatsApp Group About Sourcing Cocaine. He Was Caught When Police Downloaded His Own Client's Phone.
No one on earth had better evidence than Ben Garvey of what happens when the police seize a telephone. He had built a career on the contents of other men's handsets, had watched download after download end careers and marriages and liberty — and then typed into a group chat of seventeen. Expertise did not protect him from the obvious; it persuaded him the obvious applied to other people.
Source: Legal Futures
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The Court Warned Him His Petition Might Cost Him a Lakh. He Told the Court to Make It Two. The Court Made It Three.
He was not confused about his odds; he was raising the stakes, because a man that certain of himself treats the court's warning as an opening bid. The bench took him entirely at his word and then improved on it by half. There is no cheaper way to discover the exact market value of your own self-assurance.
Source: LiveLaw
The WireThe Executive Director of a Transport Planning Agency Spent $44,389 on First-Class Travel and Luxury Hire Cars, Which a Grand Jury Has Now Written Down in Full.
An agency that exists to plan how other people travel, run by a woman who could not be moved through an airport like other people. The expenses were not hidden in a shell company or laundered through a consultancy — they were filed, itemised and reimbursed, because she did not believe anyone would ever add them up. Someone added them up.
Source: Turlock Journal
The WireHe Is a Magistrate. He Posted About His Family Court Work on Facebook Under His Own Title.
The Family Court is the one jurisdiction where everybody involved has been promised anonymity and privacy as a condition of being there at all. He wanted the title on the post, which is the whole of it: the office was not a duty to be discharged quietly but a credential to be worn where friends could see it.
Source: Judicial Conduct Investigations Office
The WireThey Hid Two Ownership Notices From the Judge and Re-Packaged the Email That Sank Their Case. The High Court Called It Magical Thinking.
A without-notice application is the one moment in litigation when nobody is there to contradict you, which is precisely why the duty of candour bites hardest there. They treated an unopposed hearing as an unwitnessed one. The documents they buried were filed on a public register in Malta, where anybody who cared to look would find them, and eventually somebody did.
Source: Legal Futures
Black-Robed EgomaniaShe Sat on the Judgment for Over a Year. She Had Already Been Sanctioned for Exactly This. They Took the Case Off Her and Gave It to Someone Else.
A judge's power to refuse to decide is the only one nobody can appeal. There is no hearing you can demand against a silence, no remedy for a year in which your case simply sat somewhere being thought about, and she had already been told once that this was misconduct. The warning is the system conceding that the only way to get a judgment out of her was to find a different judge.
Source: Judicial Conduct Investigations Office
LazyTownHe Had Already Decided the Case. Writing Down What He Had Decided Took Him Twelve and a Half Weeks.
The thinking was done. The hearing was over, the decision was made, and all that stood between two unrepresented people and the order governing their lives was the act of typing it out. For three months he did not type it out. Nothing in the file suggests he was busy; what the file suggests is that the people waiting could not make him hurry, and he knew it.
Source: Judicial Conduct Investigations Office
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