Veteran Auckland practitioner Georgina Grant, with nearly 30 years’ experience, has learned that “out of character” is no defence when you stonewall the regulator.
At a New Zealand Lawyers & Conveyancers Disciplinary Tribunal hearing last month the panel signalled it would censure Grant, find her guilty of misconduct, suspend her for four months, and order her to pay $11,456 in costs plus tribunal costs. A full written decision is still to come.
The charge, laid by Auckland Standards Committee 3, centres on sustained non-engagement with the Lawyers Complaints Service. Over a three-year period Grant failed to respond to at least eight formal statutory requests for information and documents tied to two separate complaints.
The first complaint landed in August 2024 and related to a High Court appeal notice filed three years earlier. Despite an extension, nothing was supplied between October 2024 and February 2025.
The second involved building-defect proceedings at an Auckland apartment development. A December 2024 complaint triggered repeated requests for engagement letters, invoices, time records and other material. Again, extensions were granted — again, zero compliance.
Grant told the tribunal the lapses were completely out of character and that she took full responsibility. She insisted she had continued to meet professional standards for her clients throughout. She initially argued the conduct amounted only to unsatisfactory conduct, but later withdrew that submission.
The Standards Committee pushed for an extra order preventing her from practising on her own account, pointing to an affidavit in which she described “placing the regulatory matters in a bubble” while running a busy litigation practice. The panel was not persuaded. It found insufficient evidence that her regulatory failures translated into any risk to clients, and explicitly declined to restrict her right to practise generally.
“Our current position is that we don’t see a sufficient basis for making an order that she be prevented from practising on her own account,” the tribunal stated.
Name suppression was refused.
Counsel for the committee emphasised the case was not about the underlying client complaints — it was about sustained non-engagement with the regulator. The tribunal agreed, noting that repeated defaults of this kind are “generally treated as misconduct.”
Suspension is set to kick in on 1 April 2026 unless the panel is persuaded otherwise by written submissions on the start date.
Blunt Reminder for Lawyers
The Lawyers and Conveyancers Act makes cooperation with the regulator mandatory — not optional, not “when you get around to it.” This case is a blunt reminder that ignoring LCS requests, even for months on end, will almost always cross the misconduct threshold.
The tribunal’s refusal to impose a practising-on-own-account ban is helpful clarification for solo and small-firm lawyers, that regulatory slip-ups alone won’t automatically strip you of your right to run your own practice.
But the four-month suspension and costs order show the profession’s disciplinary bodies are prepared to hit non-cooperation hard, particularly if it stretches across multiple complaints and years.
The written decision will be published in due course on the Ministry of Justice tribunal decisions page.
