Complaint to OLSC about barrister Michelle Campbell

This is a complaint to the Office of the NSW Legal Services Commissioner about barrister Michelle Campbell. Complaint has 9 steps, so I go one by one. Some information is hidden to protect privacy of involved people.

Complaint Details

Have you tried to resolve matter with the lawyer?

Yes.

If yes, how? If not, why not?

Note: an electronic form may lose text formatting, so I add the same information in a separate document as an attachment together with detailed info named “2023-10-29 Complaint to OLSC about barrister Michelle Campbell.pdf”.

Michelle Campbell provided counseling for solicitor Moya de Luca-Leonard. I have not contacted her directly only through Ms. Leonard. There is a tripartite agreement to have costs agreed or assessed, but Moya de Luca-Leonard is providing false information that her costs have been accepted. On 2023-10-24 I sent an email to Ms. Leonard offering to pay her and Ms. Campbell reasonable fees, but Moya has not replied to it yet.

If I understand correctly, bill is not payable as the contract with Ms. Leonard. The bill becomes payable only after money are received form insurance. Same applies to Michelle bill. I have PTSD from the road traffic injury, and they represented me on personal injury claim for this injury. It makes very difficult for me to deal with anything related to the injury and I misunderstood the deadlines in the past. To avoid similar situation, I am submitting a complaint while in my understanding there is still room for negotiations.

Please provide a summary of your complaint and include the following details:

• What happened? Who was involved?
• Details of significant events, such as dates of meetings and court hearings.
• What are your concerns?

I came to Ms. Leonard in June 2020 to help me with my personal injury claim after a road traffic injury in 2015-03-30. I have been scammed by a personal injury firm named Law Partners. Ms. Leonard promised to deal with exorbitant costs from Law Partners and to significantly improve my claim. Ms. Leonard included Ms. Campbell for counseling, but I am not sure what was the role of Ms. Campbell. I have met her only once on zoom meeting that lasted about 40 minutes. She has prepared update for my statement. However, I could have done it myself and maybe even more accurately if given instructions what has to be included in statement. Ms. Campbell wrote one advice about settlement proposal after I told Ms. Leonard that I am not interested in settling and I would like to have my claim assessed by independent assessor. I had previously terrible experience with fake settlement negotiations and did not want to get involved with it again. I was shocked when I got Michelle invoice for $13,090. I do not know where is comes from. To make it worse I think her advice about settling was negligent. It seems that she spent 5 minutes or so just glancing at my case. It did not take into account my qualification, work before the injury (on my own project) or later attempts to come back to work.

Ms. Campbell ignored information about errors in report provided by insurer QBE written by psychologist Vanitha Moodley. The consequences for not dismissing the Ms. Moodley report were terrible. That report could have been easily dismissed as it has an enormous list of absurd factual errors (I counted 146) that would require a teleportation device, time travel, is completely insistent and so on. I cannot believe how lawyers can be this negligent or even worse intentionally did not want to dispute it. QBE used this report to complain about medical assessment and ask for review. Ms. Campbell should have prepared arguments to dismiss Moodley report and its arguments if Ms. Campbell did at least small part of the work she claims that have done. Disproving Moodley report was easy as it full of obvious factual errors. Unfortunately nothing was done and review was granted. The PIC medical assessment panel took this into account and my chances to get anything more than a so-called buffer ($100,000) for the loss of income became minuscule. I have no income since the injury and future looks very grim. Before the injury I was a highly skilled software developer with a PhD in computer science.

Ms. Campbell grossly exaggerated her fees. I was informed about Ms. Campbell work by Ms. Leonard and it seems way less than claimed by Ms. Campbell.

At some point Ms. Leonard informed that Ms. Campbell retired from work and can not represent me. However, I still see her in the list of barristers. It may been just a way to apply psychological pressure on me to settle without independent assessment to avoid extra fees for introducing new barrister.

My experience with Ms. Campbell made me think that including barrister in claim is just waste of money. She was not abuse like previous barrister Ken Pryde, she actually was polite, but I can not identify significant benefit for including her in claim. Definitely does not match the bill she provided. I am not aware of contribution to my claim she is stating in her bill. My claim did not got to independent assessment even if I was asking for it. Ms. Campbell involvement felt like a barrier to it.

How do you want us to help you to resolve your complaint?

Please note: One of our officers may contact you to discuss what we can and we cannot do

1. Her bill is grossly exaggerated, please help me to reduce it to reasonable sum
2. I have not signed agreement with Ms. Campbell and I believe regulated costs should be applied when all actions taken into account
3. By removing her self from claim without any reason given her fees should be affected too as to get barrister representation for independent assessment there will be need for extra work
4. I believe some of her actions unprofessional and at least negligent. I believe this should reduce her fees. I hope you will take an appropriate action.

What area of legal service does this complaint arise from?

Personal injuries

Are you disputing the legal costs you have been charged by your lawyer?

Yes

Notes

I am trying to describe everything as accurately as I can. Unfortunately many of these memories cause high levels of stress. It quickly triggers PTSD response and shuts down my ability to think. Often I have to take a long break or can continue only the next day. I do not know if I need to describe every event when I believe Moya Leonard acted unfairly in her own interests. I came to Moya asking help with scamming lawyers from Law Partners firm (Gillian Potts and Ken Pryde), instead I learned that all lawyers focus on inflating fees rather than your claim. She failed to include important information and lied about other things. This is the second time I am writing a complaint about a lawyer, but previous one has not been processed yet and also due to my illness I may be missing important bits. If there is more information required please let me know. Previously I tried to fit everything into 1 application with 10 attachments. This meant that I had to merge many documents and I think it is not a good idea. I realized that you probably handle everything in electronic form and it would be much easier if every document is separate file. So, I will attach the ones that I think are more important and send others later. This also makes it difficult to describe everything in details. So, I hope the best way is to provide here brief description of what happened and what I am complaining about and then provide more detail information about specifics with attached evidences.

There were also other problems related to PTSD as some memories got blocked and I risk missing some important information while writing complaint, but it might come back later. Also when stressed I may not express my self very clearly, partially it is due to the fact that then I think in Lithuanian and may lose some meaning in translation. However, I do my best to be precise and I try to present facts first (actually I have many of them running in my mind, just struggling to put them in writing in clear way).

I also do not know what to do with some attachments. For example there were some documents that were dozens of pages, but the information that I need is only on one page. I try to upload all files I will reach file size limit, but if I take only one page from document it might looks suspicious. I hope to ask about this the person who will be assigned to assess my complaint.

Before I got PTSD myself I never imagined how debilitating it is. It is hard to describe it and I would need to be telling it for a very long time, but I will try to provide information about it in a separate document.

Attachments

1. Complaint details
2. Cost agreement
3. Itemized bills
4. Emails