Liability for commercial advice

Lawyers are not financial advisers but, when acting for a client in a commercial transaction, lawyers will be liable for the advice that they give, or fail to give, in relation to the commercial consequences of the client’s decisions. Two recent Victorian cases have considered the extent of these duties in the context of two reasonably common scenarios. In both cases the lawyers were assisted in their defence by the LPLC, which presumably therefore assessed the lawyers’ conduct as blameless, however in both cases the lawyers were held liable to the client in contract and tort. Read more of this post