I’m from Sydney and practising Tort Law and yes I love running ‘hopeless’ cases because that keeps me awake at nights.

Keep blogging.
BTW, I write this with clean hands.

Law

I also share an unhealthy love of equity - in commercial matters I always liked to put a bunch of equitable claims on the end of any statutory/contractual/common law claims, it’s very surprising how useless many commercial lawyers are when it comes to equity.

I’m sure i’ll be asking you questions regarding property, equity and trusts during the course of the year. As long as you’re fine with it.

To my mind, a legal representative acts as a filter, looking at things dispassionately and telling a client when his or her behaviour is not sensible or ethical. Otherwise, we may as well just let litigants have fisticuffs in a ring instead and forget the legal process.

If you came to my classes, I’d teach you to love Property, Equity and Restitution. And, of course, the resulting trust.

I indicated my surprise to my client that his former employer had not been persuaded by his solicitor to drop the case, as even if he wins it will get him absolutely nowhere, and financially speaking is a poor decision.

My client looked at me in surprise and said “of course they’re encouraging him to take the case - they’ll get buckets of money!”

I felt slightly ill at the idea that a solicitor would encourage a pointless case just to get money, and I tried to say that that was not how solicitors worked - but realised that the best I could say was that’s not how they’re supposed to operate.

I guess it’s another one of the reaons lawyers get a bad name….

“The facts” of a case are a funny thing. When I worked in the Court, I used to find it very weird seeing witnesses examined - it was like you were getting a peep into a totally different world for a few days - and you’d have to learn about all kinds of strange things to understand what was going on (eg, if the case was about tyre manufacturing, you’d become a sudden expert on aspects of tyre making).

I even learnt some Greek when we had a witness who didn’t speak English - I know the Greek for “mortgage”, “bank account”, “house”, “land transfer”…I’m sure that will get me a long way if I ever get stranded in Greece.