Franks File Speaks Frankly of Dimwits and Nonsense

John Bowie

There is, somewhere in Wellington, a Law Society Standards Committee whose members presumably rise each morning, gaze into the bathroom mirror, and think: yes — today I shall save the Nation from the menace of correspondence.

It is the only plausible explanation for what was just visited on Stephen Franks, the battle-hardened Wellington solicitor of fifty years’ standing whose firm, Franks Ogilvie, committed the unforgivable sin of – brace yourselves – writing a letter for a client.

The client, Inflection Point New Zealand, had concerns about prescribing puberty blockers to gender-dysphoric adolescents. Whether you find that compelling or contemptible is neither here nor there. The client did what clients have done since the invention of the quill, namely telling its lawyer to put the concerns, on letterhead, to about twenty medical practitioners.

This, in the New Zealand of 2026, and for its law profession, was apparently a hanging offence.

Six complaints duly fluttered into the Law Society. None from the doctors on the receiving end. Two from other pearl-clutching lawyers, poor dears, which tells you what you need to know about the chamber-of-piety the modern profession has become.

By a rare majority, the legal equivalent of being booed off the church bake-sale, the Committee, wo descending like Victorian maiden aunts, landing on the killer charge that Franks had failed to use legal processes for a “proper purpose”. His sin? Using firm letterhead to lend weight to his client’s position.

To which one is moved to reply: exactly, you dolts. That is rather the point. The words land harder on serifed stationery than scrawled in biro on the back of a Pak’nSave receipt.

Not all of the Committee, mind – he generously noted the lack of unanimity proved “they were not all idiots.”

If lending weight to a client’s concerns is now misconduct, every commercial solicitor in the country should hand back the practising certificate by Friday and take up beekeeping.

Mercifully, the Legal Complaints Review Officer, Fraser Goldsmith, possessed both a pulse and a working dictionary, as well as a decent dash of ex Anderson Lloyd, Mainland common sense, where the air is clearer. He quashed the censure with the weary clarity one reserves for explaining to a toddler why one cannot eat the cat. “This cannot conceivably be improper in principle,” he observed, though I suspect he wanted to add you absolute dimwits, appellate dignity forbidding.

Franks, having no such dignity to preserve, supplied the word himself. He called the committee dimwits. I guess that will be now known as the “D” word, adding to the lexicon of words we should not use. This was, after all, a masterclass in institutional dimwitery.

He called the ruling stupid. He pronounced himself relieved the decision was a majority one, since this at least proved his colleagues were not all idiots — a qualified compliment any regulator should frame above the photocopier. The regulatory apparatus of several professions, he added, has been captured by the spiritual descendants of those who, in a less squeamish century, would have been stacking firewood around the village witch.

He is not entirely wrong. The result is a legal culture resembling a nervous staffroom at a third-tier polytechnic, where the worst sin is to make somebody uncomfortable — and the second worst is to do so in writing.

Goldsmith also raised a sceptical eyebrow at the fact that two complainants were practising lawyers themselves, and wondered how warmly they might have embraced robust advocacy had the boot been on the other foot. One suspects they would have rediscovered free expression at the speed of a man finding his wallet in a burning house.

As for the Law Society: it has responded with the bureaucratic equivalent of staring at its shoes. Franks, who has donated thousands of unpaid hours to the institution, notes that nobody has called to apologise. They wouldn’t. Apology requires noticing one has done something silly — the one finding the Committee will never reach.

Welcome then to a profession that has begun to flinch at its own shadow. The good news is that the grown-ups still exist, somewhere on review. The bad news is that they shouldn’t have had to.