4 minute read
MISCONDUCT PRACTICE
Jeremy King in conversation with Megan Sanidad
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Passionate human rights advocate Jeremy King is a lawyer and Accredited Specialist in Personal Injury Law from the Law Institute of Victoria. He spoke to us about his experiences as both a personal injury and police misconduct lawyer and provided useful advice to students aiming to enter similar areas of law.
“I’ve been in the legal profession for 16 years and I’m currently a Principal at Robinson Gill Lawyers, where I head up 2 areas of law – the injury law team as a whole and the police accountability team. I do litigation work against Victoria Police for what we call ‘ police torts’ , which tend to be things like assault, battery, false imprisonment, misfeasance in public office, and in some cases, negligence claims. I’ve worked on a few high-profile cases, including Dani Laidley, which involved the police taking photos of Dani while she was in custody and leaking those photos; Nik Dimopoulos, who suffered injuries when police raided his apartment and bookshelf; Eathan Cruse, a young Aboriginal man who suffered injuries when police raided his family home and restrained and assaulted him; and Chris Karadaglis, who became a quadriplegic after police put him in a headlock and caused injuries to his spine.
Those are some of the bigger cases I’ve been involved in. I think that when you ’re doing that type of litigation, it’s very challenging – you ’re up against the Victoria Police and State of Victoria. You have to make sure that whenever you ’re suing Victoria Police, that you have a mindset of being willing to keep pushing on and fighting hard in order to make sure you get the best result for your client.
I started off doing injury law – work cover claims, TAC claims – which I still do now, but I took a bit of a break earlier in my career and did my Masters in Natural Human Rights Law at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Following that, I had a pretty big interest in tort law and human rights law – and one of the areas where those two things intersect is police litigation. It was a nice mix for me in terms of being able to do some human rights work and social justice cases and being able to apply the knowledge that I used in injury law cases as well.
Advice for students: Law is very broad and there’s many different areas you can get involved in, so I think that doing study and developing that specialised knowledge is a really great way of finding out, (1): what you ’re interested in, and (2): being able to practice in that area a bit more easily once you get into it.
Human rights law is amazing. It’s extremely valuable and important, but it’s a tricky area to get into, and sometimes you have to find a backdoor entry. That’s how I managed to get into police torts. I think the best thing you can do it to read widely on it – obviously study hard at university, but really sink your teeth into it and even do some further studies such as a Masters so that you have specialised knowledge.
Any volunteer work you can do with any organisation that does human rights work is invaluable, because it’s a pretty difficult and competitive sphere to get into. Any way you can build your experience and knowledge in that area is something you should be doing, and that can be anything from volunteering at a community legal centre to getting involved with the Human Rights Law Centre to writing an article for a journal relating to human rights law. Whatever it may be, building up that knowledge and experience to be able to get your foot in the door is critical.
Practicing law and studying law are two very different things. Unfortunately, when I was at law school, there wasn’t really a focus on practical applications of human rights law and all sorts of types of strategic litigation. There’s also the inspirational side of it as well, knowing that every day there are people out there using the law for change and that sort of aspect of it is really important. That’s always sort of what I wanted –to really do something that can potentially have a meaningful impact on society and address wrongs that have been visited upon vulnerable, disadvantaged members of the community.
My other advice would be for law students to get into court – if you ’re aware of a good case that’s currently happening, go and watch it. Watching barristers crossing down witnesses, seeing how evidence can shape legal arguments, and seeing how judges and juries deal with those cases is invaluable and brings to life the principles that are discussed in class. ”
