Judgment delivered in another Lloyd Rayney defamation case … Two years gestation … Recusal application denied … Appeal pending … Another Perth supermodel not getting up for under $10,000 a day … Appeal judges ask for more details of work done … Groper reports
WA Supremo Jenni Hill finally delivered her reasons in Rayney v Reynolds, the defamation case brought by former Perth barrister Lloyd Rayney against forensic crime investigator Dr Mark Reynolds.
Reynolds told a university seminar in 2014 there is “no need for a cold case review” into Mrs Corryn Rayney’s death because “the offender was identified”.
Lloyd Rayney in 2012 was found not guilty the murder of his wife and the state unsuccessfully appealed.
Justice Hill heard the defamation case in July 2020 and over two years later published her reasons on October 31, 2022. She explained:
“It has not been possible to complete the reasons for my decision as quickly as I would have liked.”
Anyway, everythng was as fresh as a daisy because she made notes, listened to recordings and consulted the transcript.
Theodora also had the solemn duty to report last month that Hill took over two and a half years to deliver reasons in a case about a family run IPA outlet, Nguyen v Nguyen Huynh (WA) Pty Ltd.
Hill awarded Rayney a whopping $350,000 in aggravated damages and another $88,400 in interest. About 80 people at the seminar may have heard Reynolds’ comment, but who knows how far it travelled along the “grapevine”.
After the case was reserved, Dr Reynolds discovered that Justice Hill had worked for Rayney’s counsel Martin Bennett at his law firm in Perth for 12-and-a half-years. She failed to disclosed this in court.
The judge rejected Reynolds’s application that she recuse herself from handing down the judgment.
Reynolds is now appealing Hill’s decision not to recuse herself and will apply for a stay of her defamation judgment.
Even if the stay application is unsuccessful, the defendant’s assets would be insufficient to meet this and other debts.
In 2017, Rayney was awarded $846,180.82 in aggravated damages for non-economic loss including interest and $1,777,235 for damages for economic loss including interest after he was found by Justice John Chaney to have been defamed in a September 2007 press conference when Detective Senior Sergeant Jack Lee named him as the prime and only suspect in the murder of his wife.
Supermodel diva Naomi Campbell didn’t get out of bed for under $10,000 a day. Now we know it’s even more pricey for Perth silk Grant Donaldson to “get up”. He comes for $11,000 a day.
The WA court of appeal ordered Donaldson to spell out the details of his billing above and beyond the oft repressed phrase in his invoices, “getting up”.
His client was Mammoth Investments, which had a set to over land deals with the Rural Bank.
Donaldson – WA’s former solicitor general, appointed by The Christian Porter – issued four invoices for the period September 4, 2019 to December 22, 2019 totalling $800,000.
For instance, the invoice of October 31, 2019, for $149,380 (including GST and $10,780 for junior barrister James Sippe), looked like this:
The other invoices were in similar terms.
The people from Mammoth complained that the invoices were not satisfactorily itemised and wanted more details about the charges.
Donaldson argued that he was not required to give an itemised bill to a lay client in circumstances where the client had instructed a solicitor.
The court of appeal thought otherwise on that point and went on to decide that in this instance the words “getting up” did not reveal the “necessary particulars of the services charged”.
“How the costs for those entries were made up was not specified in detail. The extent of deployment of the item ‘getting up’, absent any particulars, rendered the bills opaque as to the work done by the respondent …”
Donaldson has to try harder and spell out what he did.
The appeal judges arrived at that conclusion after considering “the number of days and hours in respect of which the item ‘getting up’ was deployed in the invoices; the period of time to which these invoices related; the prevalence of the items ‘getting up’ as a proportion of the total time billed in the invoices; and the apparent inability of the solicitors to make a judgment about the reasonableness of the hours”.
It looks very much like an instance of murky invoicing at top speed.
The case also shines a light on allowing solicitors-general to have a right of private practice, so that the government can “attract the most senior counsel from the bar, as in Mr Donaldson’s case”.
Mammoth Investments v Donaldson