The supervision lesson every principal needs to know

Rule 37 of the Legal Profession Uniform Law Australian Solicitors Conduct Rules 2015 (Conduct Rules) obliges solicitors with designated responsibility for a matter to exercise reasonable supervision over solicitors and all other employees engaged in the provision of legal services for that matter.

Because the client's retainer is with the law practice, not the individual file handler, the duty to supervise rests with the principals of the firm. The level of supervision required varies with the experience of the employee and the complexity of the work, but the responsibility does not.

Where a firm is engaged in connection with litigation, the courts have the power to make a non-party costs order against the firm, if the firm’s conduct causes costs to be incurred improperly or wasted by a failure to act with reasonable competence.

That is the framework. Two recent decisions show what it looks like when supervision fails.

The plaintiff's case had been on foot since 2021, run through seven firms of solicitors, and was approaching a 15-day trial. With trial imminent, the plaintiff filed two further witness statements, more than 60 objections to expert reports, and an application for leave to adduce that evidence. The only affidavit explaining the delay was sworn by Mr Finn, a recently admitted employed solicitor.

The principal with day-to-day conduct of the matter did not put on an affidavit himself.

Howard J was direct. The responsibility for the matter rested with the principal, not the employed solicitor. The resourcing of the case was "not a matter for an employed solicitor. It is a matter for the principal or principals of the firm" (at [138]). And then the line that matters most (at [140]):

Any idea that it is appropriate for a more junior practitioner to be taking responsibility on oath for the failings of more senior practitioners is to be rejected outright. Responsibility is not to be moved downwards.

A few months earlier, the Federal Court reached a similar conclusion in Murray on behalf of the Wamba Wemba Native Title Claim Group v State of Victoria [2025] FCA 731. A junior solicitor had prepared footnotes for two court documents. Many of the citations turned out to be false. The principal solicitor was ordered to pay the other parties' costs personally, on an indemnity basis.

Justice Murphy's analysis went directly to supervision (at [15]):

The error was centrally one of failing to check and verify the output of the search tool, which was contributed to by the inexperience of the junior solicitor and the failure of [the file principal] to have systems in place to ensure that [the solicitor's] work was appropriately supervised and checked.

The principal had not built a system to check the work. That was the failure.

The two judgments each make clear:

• When something goes wrong, the principal is the one the court expects to explain it, on oath if needed.
• A principal who delegates work to a junior must have a process for checking it before it leaves the firm.
• Both judgments treat the junior's inexperience as a factor that increases the supervisor's obligation, not one that softens it.

The clearest signal from Murray is that supervision needs to be structural. An open-door policy is not a system. Practitioners who rely on the junior to raise problems will not learn about the problems they most need to know about.

Supervision is more durable when it is built into the firm's existing workflow:

• At matter opening. Decide at file open who will supervise, what the supervision cadence will be, and what categories of work cannot leave the firm without principal review. The matter opening form is the natural place to record this.
• In work allocation. Practice management software allows tasks to be assigned with due dates and reviewers. Configure it so that delegated tasks default to having a named reviewer, and so that the reviewer's sign-off is recorded.
• On a file review schedule. Set fixed intervals at which the principal reviews every file run by an early-career practitioner, regardless of whether the practitioner has raised anything. The interval will depend on practice area and the supervisee's experience. The discipline is the schedule, not the frequency.
• At external touchpoints. Identify the points at which work leaves the firm, be it letters of advice, court filings, correspondence with the other side or undertakings, and require principal sign-off at those points by default.

Once the structure is there, these four skills make it work.

Assess the work before delegating it. The supervisor should ask whether the legal question is within the supervisee's capability, whether the personalities, time pressure, and complexity are manageable, and what "done well" looks like. In Badat, the demands of trial preparation across a six-year matter were not realistically within the capability of the employed solicitor without close direction from the principal.

Delegate clearly. Choose the right person. Communicate what needs to be done, by when, and what the finished product should contain. A short conversation at the front end about checking citations might have prevented the problem in Murray.

Check the work. Supervisors should confirm the supervisee understands the task, check progress at sensible intervals, and review the output before it goes anywhere external.

Give specific feedback. "The advice letter at page 34 did not address the guarantee risk. Use the firm's standard risk disclosure next time" is a teaching moment. "Be more careful" is not.

These habits have to be budgeted for. Supervision squeezed between client demands is the first thing to fail. Firms that allocate time in supervisors' budgets to do the job properly recognise it as an investment that prevents larger costs later, in claims, in indemnity costs orders, and in the loss of capable junior staff who do not get developed.

If a matter ends up before a court, the court will look first at the principal. Not the junior. Not the firm in the abstract. The principal.

Build the systems. Allocate the time. Read the work before it leaves.

• Victorian Legal Services Board and Commissioner: Supervision Plan Template
• LPLC Podcast: Reframing supervision as the greatest compliment
• LPLC Delegation/supervision instruction sheet
• LPLC Client file audit tool