Connolly, Steven John
Allegation / charges
1. Breached section 255 LPA 2004 - Holding, disbursing and accounting for trust money<BR/>2. Breached section 261(1)(b) LPA 2004 - Dealing with trust money: legal costs and unclaimed money<BR/>3. Breached section 263 LPA 2004 - Reporting certain irregularities and suspected irregularities<BR/>4. Breached section 264 LPA 2004 - Keeping trust records<BR/>5. Caused a deficiency in the trust account and/or trust account ledger<BR/>6. Breached clause 88 of the Legal Profession Regulation 2004 - Withdrawing trust money for legal costs<BR/>7. Engaged in unethical conduct<BR/>8. Failed to provide an itemised account<BR/>9. Behaved inappropriately towards a client — Professional Misconduct
Findings — machine-extracted (anthropic-batch:claude-opus-4-8); verify against the decision
The practitioner was found to have committed professional misconduct through multiple breaches of the Legal Profession Act 2004 and Legal Profession Regulation 2004, including failures in holding and accounting for trust money, keeping trust records, reporting irregularities, causing a trust account deficiency, unethical conduct, failing to provide an itemised account and behaving inappropriately toward a client. No express finding of dishonesty appears, and no sanction is stated in the provided text.
Duties found breached:
- Honesty
- No taking unfair advantage
- No conflict between current clients
- No improper use of client money
- Accounting records, reconciliation and reports
- Report serious misconduct of others
⚠ figures not found verbatim in the source were dropped: ["extracted_from_register_summary"]
Duties engaged
Other decisions involving this respondent
Matched by respondent name — may include a different person with the same name.
Documents
Source: https://portal.olsc.nsw.gov.au/dasearchbn/daresultdetail?id=bf5ea7df-b633-eb11-bf74-000d3ad1941e