LAWYER REVEALED AS SMOKING SOURCE
A FORMER senior partner at Clayton Utz, Christopher Dale, has
outed himself as the source of a damaging leak of secret
internal documents published in The Sunday Age late last year.
The leak sparked an investigation by the Director of Public
Prosecutions over whether criminal charges should be laid
against a former high-profile Clayton Utz lawyer, as well as
inquiries by legal services commissioners in Victoria and NSW.
Mr Dale said he leaked hundreds of pages of a secret Clayton Utz
investigation because he believed there had been a miscarriage of
justice in the 2002 case involving lung cancer victim Rolah
McCabe.
"I believed there may have been a fraud committed on the Supreme
Court of Victoria and that a full investigation was required," he
said.
Mr Dale is a former president of the Law Institute of Victoria,
a former board member of Clayton Utz and a member of the
Victorian Supreme Court's rules committee.
He was expelled from Clayton Utz in August last year, after more
than 19 years with the firm, but denied this was behind his
decision to leak the documents to The Sunday Age.
"It's quite plain there's a great sense of miscarriage of
justice in the McCabe camp and I might say some basis to reopen
the matter. So what do you do? Do you just sit on that? . . .
Mr Dale, a commercial and insolvency lawyer, was appointed in
2002 to conduct an internal investigation into Clayton Utz
lawyers who had acted for British American Tobacco when it was
sued by mother of four Mrs McCabe.
