By Kate Allman -
NSW Supreme Court Justice Julie Ward passes on an important lesson for solicitors ... triple check emails before sending them.
When I started out as a solicitor I was told, “You should write all correspondence as if one day it might be read by a judge.”
I guess it’s not something I wish I knew, because I was told that at the start, but the importance of that lesson has really come home to me now that I am a judge. Especially when I see correspondence that has not been given enough thought.
When I was a solicitor I had one case where a piece of correspondence that I had written on behalf of a client was put almost line by line to a witness in cross examination. While it was excruciating to sit there and hear my own words being put to a witness, I thought at the time, “Thank goodness I drafted that carefully.”
