ASSESSMENT 2 – INDIVIDUAL ASSIGNMENT
Marks: 30% of the overall assessment for the unit
Submission: Online via Moodle
Format: One file in .doc or .docx (MS Word) format.
Submissions in any other format (e.g. .zip) will be treated as a non-submission.
Word limit: 2,400 words
Final submission due: 11.45 pm, 11 January 2024
Late penalties will be strictly applied at the rate of 5% of the total mark (ie 1.5 marks) per day. Extensions of time can only be sought via the online extension system. Extensions cannot be sought by email.
Referencing: All referencing to comply with Australian Guide to Legal Citation (4th
ed). When referencing evidence, you should refer to the statement and a paragraph number or numbers – eg Statement of John Smith [10].
Task:
You are a newly employed solicitor at a medium-sized firm in Brisbane. Your supervising partner is about to go on an interstate business trip and she has asked you to prepare a legal opinion on a case. She gives you three witness statements (provided on the Moodle site):
- Statement of John Phillip Knock;
- Statement of Anna MarieSheldon;
- Statement of Herbert McNeil;
- Statement of Samuel David Gross.
Mr Knock, Ms Sheldon and Mr McNeil are directors of a company that went into liquidation in 2021. The liquidator has recently informed them that he is considering legal action against them for breach of directors’ duties. Your task is to provide an advice to your supervising partner on the potential liabilities of each of the directors for breach of duty. You will need to consider the exposure of each director separately and you need to consider all types of directors’ duties.
Some further guidance is provided on the following page.
Guidance
Providing a legal opinion involves analysis of facts as well as law. You need to explain the relevant law and apply it to the facts. In real life cases, the facts may not always be clear from the evidence, so you may have to consider the possibility of different factual findings, which may involve making (and stating) some assumptions. If you think that some further evidentiary investigations could be worthwhile, you can make those recommendations in your advice, but remember that it is not always possible to get all the evidence that you would like. Sometimes, you have to make do with what you’ve got, especially if you are a junior solicitor giving advice at the start of a case. You should not use lack of evidence as an excuse for giving no opinion.
Marking
Like most real life cases, this exercise is not designed to have clear-cut, black-and-white answers. There is no single correct answer. What we are looking for is an application of your legal technique to facts derived from the evidence available to you. The main factor that we will look for in the marking is that the opinion contains a logical thread throughout. The law that you describe should form the foundation for your lines of reasoning. Any analysis of the evidence should be clearly related to a legal principle that you are applying and form part of that reasoning. The easiest way to do this is to use the logic of IRAC. There will be multiple issues to address, so you may wish to use more than one IRAC in your answer.
There will be no strict, preconceived allocation of marks to issues or possible answers. There will be an emphasis in the marking on:
- the logical flow of your opinion;
- the logic being founded on correct principles of law;
- careful consideration of the evidence;
- consideration of all plausible arguments, whether they favour your final opinion or not;
- how persuasive and/or convincing your argument and conclusions are.
In this situation, your supervising partner knows that there is no absolute right answer to these cases. What she is looking for is to be persuaded by your opinion so that the firm can adopt it rather than second-guess it. This depends very much on how well it is reasoned.
Peter Robinson Unit Coordinator
LAWS13009 – Term 3, 2023
