AUGUSTUS ERNEST LEE-STEERE
Allegation / charges
Professional Misconduct and Suspended
Findings — machine-extracted (anthropic-batch:claude-opus-4-8); verify against the decision
The State Administrative Tribunal found solicitor Augustus Ernest Lee-Steere guilty of professional misconduct for practising while uncertificated, knowingly misleading the Legal Practice Board and Complaints Committee by falsely representing he had not practised, failing to cooperate with regulatory requests, notices and summonses, breaching a personal undertaking, and failing to properly maintain his trust account. The Committee sought removal from the roll, but the Tribunal, treating it as a borderline case in light of the practitioner's youth, inexperience, matrimonial stress, lack of prior misconduct and absence of client loss, ordered suspension of his practising certificate for three years and costs of $10,000.
Duties found breached:
- No improper communication with the court
- Not mislead third parties or opponents
- Uphold public trust in the profession
- Hold a current practising certificate
- Self-report to the regulator
- Report serious misconduct of others
- Honour professional undertakings
Aggravating factors:
- Conduct and unanswered requests extended over a period of more than two years
- Persistent failure to cooperate with the regulatory body and comply with notices, summonses and personal undertakings
- Undermining the authority of the regulatory body
- Ex post facto, self-serving and disingenuous explanations offered only at the penalty hearing
- Knowingly misleading the regulator on multiple occasions and never correcting the false impression
Mitigating factors:
- Practitioner was relatively young and inexperienced at the relevant time
- No prior contraventions of the Act
- Was under matrimonial stress at the relevant time
- No evidence of monetary loss to any client from the trust account failures
- No dishonesty in the conduct of clients' affairs
- Admitted the allegations and did not oppose costs order
⚠ figures not found verbatim in the source were dropped: ["unverified_suspension_months=36"]