A public company was the tenant of a very large industrial property and when they vacated they left behind a huge amount of damage and deferred maintenance. They ignored 11 attempts by the landlord to get them or their experts to help determine the repair work and costs.
The tenant leased many properties and would have been advised by lawyers that if they ignored a lease and created a money-making dispute for lawyers to exploit, then the litigation industry would make sure that they were well rewarded.
The landlord was a charitable trust and it was forced to arrange repairs and forced to use lawyer controlled arbitration to try to get reimbursed.
The case took 9 years and the lawyers involved charged the parties over $2,600,000 in fees and other charges.
Those operating in the litigation industry ensured that the bad tenant was not penalised for their numerous breaches of the lease and they were actually rewarded for creating a dispute for lawyers to control and exploit
The charitable trust landlord had done nothing wrong but the lease it signed was largely ignored and it was only partly compensated. As a result, it suffered the following losses amounting to over $2,780,000:
| Repair costs paid but compensation denied | $869,512 |
| Rent for repair period but compensation denied | $815,000 |
| Interest on delayed payments but compensation denied | $520,000 |
| Legal costs paid but compensation denied | $581,435 |
| Total losses suffered | $2,786,806 |
Other losses were suffered but could not be claimed.
If the tenant had been a good tenant and had complied with the lease, the landlord would not have suffered any of the costs, losses, disruptions and negative impacts of a long drawn out dispute.
If lawyers had not prevented cases of over $15,000 going to the Disputes Tribunal and had not forced arbitration on the landlord, the ‘open and shut case ’ could have gone to the Disputes Tribunal. It would have been all over within a month or two and the landlord would have suffered few or no losses.
Lawyers have written into the Arbitration Act 1996 the extremely unusual provision that the legal process has to be kept confidential. This is to allow lawyers to exploit innocent clients to the maximum without clients being able to get redress or complain in the news media about how they have suffered huge damage financially, mentally and in other ways. Lawyers can be as devious and dishonest as they like and put forward false and misleading information without any consequences. Lawyers are the only people who are able to legalise money-making scams by writing them into legislation.
Those lawyers who have demonstrated that they lack ethics, morals, honesty and integrity and that their main aim is to promote the litigation industry are made judges by their mates. When judges are later forced to retire, they are given lucrative arbitrator jobs.
Widespread arbitration destroys the principle of open justice which is acknowledged as a fundamental principle of the common law. Justice must be seen by the public to have been done but this cannot happen with arbitration.
The names of those involved in this case have not been included because these names have to be kept confidential and because the unacceptable things that go on are not confined to the unnamed lawyers involved here but are examples of what all lawyers do or condone.
The litigation industry and litigation processes are a mixture of moral and immoral, ethical and unethical, honest and dishonest, true and false, right and wrong, accurate and inaccurate, complete and incomplete, complex and simple, biased and unbiased, considered and ill considered, fair and unfair, just and unjust. There is nothing about the industry and the way lawyers operate in it which is satisfactory so big changes are needed. It is hoped that exposing what goes on will bring pressure on for reforms to be made.
