At What Point Does Outsourcing Constitute Malpractice?
Brett Wilson LLP's new staff page is misleading
As noted yesterday, the cat is out of the bag and it seems apparent that Brett Wilson LLP is understaffed (or under-skilled) to the point of getting outside help, maybe even help from family members (it might be both).
Before the Hearing I checked a number of older letters and saw who wrote them. They "forgot" to purge metadata - another professional failure or a case of poor practices. Probably the latter or both.
This person is also not named as staff. He left 3 years ago (and prior to that he had worked at a restaurant, so the promotions seem to have been unrealistically rapid - as is very typical at Brett Wilson LLP, where people are seemingly compensated with fancy job titles). So I decided to explore further, putting aside the potential of a wife and second barrister, which is another case of dubious conduct.
There's nothing illegal when it comes to getting help from family members (or another firm). Disclosure, however, is necessary. At Sirius, which a colleague sued some months ago, clients were not properly informed of the nepotism. Some of them found out only incidentally that wives got hired despite of a lack of degree/s and experience in IT. Why would they allow people who don't know anything about UNIX run commands on a production server (and - worse yet - sometimes paste an entire handover E-mail into the command line)?
I know Sirius well, I already told many stories about it, and I spoke about the effort to bring members of the manager's family to improvise things so as to save the business. The CEO did that several times over the years. That's why management was getting really awful and technical skills (even basic comprehension) were lacking. Bad decisions were made and bullying compensated for a lack of knowledge.
Like Brett Wilson LLP [1, 2], Sirius was low on money and with considerable debt, and just like Brett Wilson LLP it was trying to lessen the expenditure associated with salaries through associates (outsiders, akin to "gig economy" or "freelancing") and sometimes family members. In Sirius they call it "Associates" and they're like "gig workers" - lacking basic protections among other things...
To be clear, I am not sure if they got an outside person like barrister because this person already chose the same barrister as his friend and litigation ally, whom he had mentioned in his own site. Were there two barristers lined up against me? Highly unconventional, but probably permissible. Would that possibly mean they temporarily dumped the previous barrister for someone else? Maybe a female barrister refused to be the mouthpiece for an American who strangles women and tells women to kill themselves? More curiously, why would the Barrister send me letters using the name of the lawyers? It does not seem like proper procedure but some kind of 'hack'.
As noted yesterday, some of the letters and documents I receive aren't from the firm's staff but outsiders 'on loan' and maybe family members. Let's be clear: it might in fact be both at the same time!
There are some legitimate questions here; will we have answers?
In pursuit of more clarity we've sent out some E-mail to give those involved an opportunity to respond, as maybe they can explain themselves. The queries have a deadline; if we don't hear back, we'll assume we got it right and they'd rather not comment. Unwillingness to comment does not automatically imply culpability, but with clients like these it's probably better to say nothing at all (for risk of admission of guilt).
Issues like accountability and liability are at stake here.
We shall follow up as soon as we hear back or the deadline for reply is reached. █