An investigation of the NSW Office of the Legal Services Commissioner (OLSC), from its own annual reports, the public Register of Disciplinary Action, the Act that governs it and the 1993 report that created it.
The Lawyer’s Bulldog
NSW’s legal regulator has classed 14,000 complaints as misconduct complaints in ten years. The heaviest penalty it secured was a $7,500 fine.
In 2019 the Federal Circuit Court found that Owen Hughes, a solicitor on the NSW north coast, had sexually harassed his employee, who was also his client. The court called it “a very grave example of sexual harassment” and ordered him to pay her $170,000. In 2020 the Full Federal Court threw out his appeal as “devoid of merit”, and said it would have awarded her more if it could.
In November 2021 the Office of the Legal Services Commissioner (OLSC), the body that regulates NSW lawyers, looked at the same conduct. It found he’d tried to get a sexual benefit from a client and tried to stop her complaining to the Australian Human Rights Commission. It could have fined him up to $25,000 itself, or prosecuted him in the tribunal, which can fine up to $100,000.
Instead, it rated his conduct at the lower of the two levels the Act allows (unsatisfactory professional conduct) and gave him a reprimand without a fine.
“A very grave example of sexual harassment.”
Federal Circuit Court, 2019
In 2023 the Law Society refused to renew his practising certificate, finding he wasn’t a fit and proper person. It relied on the court findings and on the OLSC’s own.
The courts, the Law Society and the OLSC all dealt with the same conduct. The OLSC was the only one that treated it as minor.
Why the OLSC exists
In 1993 the NSW Law Reform Commission reviewed how lawyers were regulated and found the system fell well short. It read 144 of the Law Society’s complaint files. Two thirds of complaints were dismissed. Where it came down to the solicitor’s word against the complainant’s, the complainant was believed once. The Commission said the system promoted “the common idea that the legal profession is simply looking after its own”.
Parliament agreed, but stopped short of taking complaints away from the Law Society and Bar Council (the Councils). Instead it set up co-regulation, with the OLSC in front of them, meant to put the public ahead of the profession. The OLSC opened in 1994, and the law it worked under was firm. Complaints “must” be investigated (Legal Profession Act 1987 s 148). A dismissal had to be reviewed if the complainant asked (s 159). A complaint “must” go to the tribunal if misconduct was likely (s 155).
Those duties survived the 2004 rewrite of the Act. It also limited in-house reprimands to lesser conduct by a lawyer who was “generally competent and diligent” (s 540), and made the annual report count the complaints investigated, dismissed and prosecuted (s 691).
For twenty years its annual reports showed an active regulator. It reported the complaints it investigated, prosecuted lawyers and got some struck off, including for gross overcharging and for taking a client’s money.
What changed
In 2015 NSW adopted the Legal Profession Uniform Law, sold to Parliament as a way to cut red tape for law firms. A new Commissioner started the same year.
The Uniform Law turned the duties into discretions. The OLSC “may” investigate (Uniform Law s 282). It “may” prosecute (s 300). It reviews a decision only at its “absolute discretion” (s 313). Of the reporting list, it kept one item: “information on the operation of the complaints process” (Legal Profession Uniform Law Application Act 2014 s 26). The OLSC stopped publishing how many complaints it investigated.
Since then, the whole system has rested on the integrity of two people: the Commissioner, and the Attorney General who recommends the appointment.
Where complaints go now
With each misconduct complaint the OLSC has three choices:
- Investigate, then act. It can investigate (s 282) and make the lawyer hand over documents and explain their conduct (s 371). It can then fine the lawyer up to $25,000, order compensation, or prosecute in the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal (NCAT), which can fine up to $100,000, suspend a lawyer or recommend they be struck off (ss 299, 300, 302). If it suspects a serious offence, it must report it to the police or another proper authority (s 465).
- Send the complaint to the Councils. The Councils record about 6,500 sent to them. The OLSC decides which complaints to send on before it has investigated any of them.
- Close the complaint. The Act lets it close a complaint “without further consideration of its merits” (s 277), at what it calls a “preliminary assessment”, before any investigation.
A decade and 14,000 complaints later, the OLSC’s Register of Disciplinary Action shows 44 matters against 41 lawyers. None was struck off or suspended.
It’s getting worse. Complaints have risen by two thirds over the decade. In the last two years the OLSC recorded two penalties: a course, and a reprimand with no fine.
Most penalties understated the conduct, and most were a reprimand with no fine: a one-line entry with no reasons. It’s the OLSC’s usual penalty for everything from a slow will to sexual harassment proved in two federal courts. A reprimand without a fine is like a $0 speeding fine.
The OLSC’s last fine was for $3,000, over five years ago. The biggest penalty among the 44 was a $7,500 fine in the tribunal, after a District Court judge had already found the lawyer misled the court. The OLSC took nearly two and a half years to file.
It has also gone to court to defend reprimands with no fine, and fines of a few thousand dollars, when lawyers tried to have them overturned.
None of it protected the public. At least eight of these lawyers were later suspended, had their practising certificate cancelled or refused, or were recommended for removal, and each time someone else acted. Mouna Youssef got two reprimands with no fine in 2019 and was convicted of fraud in 2024. NCAT confirmed Wilson Shen’s reprimand with no fine in October 2024, and he was suspended the next month over client money allegedly moved into his own account.
What its annual reports show
Set that against what comes in. Year after year the OLSC’s annual reports show the same kinds of complaint, in the thousands. In ten years, of the complaints it kept for itself rather than sending to the Councils, at least 4,400 were about negligence, 3,500 about overcharging, 427 about trust money and 156 about fraud. Those counts cover all the complaints it kept, not just misconduct, and a complaint can raise more than one issue. Negligence, overcharging and fraud produced no disciplinary outcome at all. Trust money produced one reprimand.
If the Register were all you had to go on, you’d think NSW had no dodgy immigration lawyers and no overcharging. Or no regulator. Since 2021 the OLSC and the Councils have been the only regulators of immigration lawyers, and the OLSC kept about 280 immigration complaints in ten years. Not one appears on the Register.
Debt collection doesn’t even get its own line in the tables. The Victorian Legal Services Commissioner says debt collection is “one of the more frequently complained about areas of law”. In NSW nobody can tell from the reports how many complaints there are about lawyers acting for collectors, or what happened to them.
A real public complaint
I was served with a bankruptcy notice for over $110,000. I live in Queensland, I’d never had anything to do with NSW, and I’d never been sued. When I traced it back, I found a NSW solicitor had got 24 garnishee orders on a NSW judgment that didn’t exist. They went to banks, employers and other institutions around Australia.
The OLSC was the proper place to complain. Its own website said complaints about lawyers “must” be investigated. It wasn’t my job to work out whether this was professional misconduct or a criminal matter. That was the Commissioner’s job, and he’d spent 30 years in criminal law.
I did my part and complained. After 565 days, the OLSC closed it without an investigation. The letter read like a tribunal judgment: pages of reasons ending in a finding that my evidence was insufficient. It was meant to investigate the lawyer, not me. Read the case study.
Accountable to no one
“Cannot be reviewed by the NSW Parliament, the NSW Attorney General, or the NSW Department of Justice.”
NSW Government fact sheet, Complaints about lawyers, on the Commissioner’s complaint decisions
If the OLSC closes your complaint, you can’t appeal. Only the lawyer can (Uniform Law s 314; Application Act s 126).
The Ombudsman is barred from looking at it (Ombudsman Act 1974 Sch 1) and freedom of information law doesn’t reach it (GIPA Act 2009 Sch 2).
You can go to court, but you can’t win. The Act leaves closing a complaint to the Commissioner’s discretion (s 277), and in 2021 the Court of Appeal held that a closure doesn’t affect the complainant’s legal rights, so there’s nothing for a court to fix (Hastwell v Legal Services Commissioner [2021] NSWCA 20).
Even the Attorney General can’t step in, and no parliamentary committee oversees the OLSC.
Thirty years on
Parliament set up the OLSC because the Councils were looking after their own. Thirty years on, the Councils are no better: the Law Society sent about 4% of complaints to a hearing in 1991, and over the last nine years the Law Society and Bar Council together sent 2.9%. The OLSC is worse.
The body built to fix the problem has become the lawyer’s bulldog: it guards the profession and bites the people who complain.
Every figure on this page comes from public documents. The Analysis page shows how to check them yourself, and the Sources page has copies of the documents.
Published 29 October 2026. Updated 6 November 2026. All sources.