Oral Histories profi le: Morry Bailes By Lindy McNamara

Fighting the good fight

LINDY MCNAMARA

President in 2013/14, Morry Bailes was at the helm when the debate over proposed changes to compulsory third party insurance was raging. He didn’t shy away from the inevitable stoush with the Government – but in an open interview with the Law Society he reveals it eventually took a toll on his health.

Vermont Technical High School wasn’t the most common feeder school for those entering a law degree in the 1980s, and Morry Bailes admits he didn’t enjoy his university years as he “didn’t fit in”.

He wasn’t used to the “private school scene” and found it tough academically, however he persevered and graduated, securing his first – and only – job in the law with Tindall Gask & Co.

“I think I spent the first 10 years of my career just being excited about the fact that I was a lawyer,” he revealed in a frank oral history interview recorded by the Law Society.

“During Year 10 we were invited to do work experience when we were in secondary school. I applied, and was given some work experience at the Legal Services Commission for two weeks. I think the first week and a half I had to just do filing. Then for the last two days, a criminal lawyer took me to the Adelaide Magistrate’s Court and I found it exhilarating.

“I did a stint of work experience at what is now Minter Ellison, in those days it was Baker McEwen, and they offered me a job. I’ve got a slightly embarrassing letter that I wrote back to them saying that I desperately wanted to be a criminal lawyer, so thanks but no thanks! Which is probably insane.

“Anyway, I ultimately did my last lot of work experience at Tindall Gask & Co. I think I applied for the job at Tindall Gask beforehand and it seemed logical that I should go and do my work experience there. I just couldn’t believe I was in a firm.

“I was entranced by opening legal files, legal matters, entranced by everything to do with the law. When I walked in, everyone smoked. I used to smoke – not through enjoyment so much, as social obligation so I immediately, on getting the job, ran out and got myself an ashtray and set myself up in my office. I had to scratch myself – I couldn’t believe it.”

That was in 1988 and Morry has remained there ever since, with many of his peers also long-standing members of the business.

“We pride ourselves in the culture of the firm – the fact that people hang around proves it.

“When I entered the firm, I said that I wanted to do criminal law and I was I guess making a concession or a compromise in coming to an insurance firm.

“That sounds very impolite or that I was self-important, but in fact out of the 99 of us who were in the GDLP, virtually everyone got a job. It was more on our terms than the employers, in those days.

“Anyway, I said I wanted to do criminal law, and they said that Greg Howe, then a partner, would often mix it up down at the Magistrate’s Court doing guilty pleas

for drink driving matters, and so forth, so that’s what I did.

“I then continued doing criminal law, and that ultimately led me to be able to act for a number of associations, including correctional officers and police and so forth. So I ultimately did plaintiff work for injured people – injured coppers, injured correctional officers, and others. But I mixed it up with this criminal and industrial practice, and that is to this day what I do.”

In 2002 Morry was appointed Managing Partner at the age of 36. Admitting he easily becomes bored with day-to-day practice, the new position enabled him to focus his enthusiasm toward the firm, growing it into a bigger, “but very solid” business.

Today Tindall Gask Bentley is housed in a relatively new building on Light Square and is a daily reminder to Morry of his first foray as a commercial developer and the many lessons he learned during the project.

After purchasing the property and with plans for a development, Morry sensibly garnered the commitment of the TGB partners that the firm would move back into the new building once it was completed.

“That was a plan conceived before the 2008 global financial crisis. It didn’t seem quite so shiny immediately after the collapse of Lehmann Brothers,” he laughed.

“I’ve still got the newspaper of that day in my records to remind me of how horrible things can get. Anyway, banks that were one day going to give (wife) Mel and I the money weren’t the next. So we knocked a couple of storeys off it, concentrated on making it work, and got it up.

Morry Bailes (left), with Geoffrey Robertson QC, who was guest speaker at the Law Society’s Centenary Dinner during Morry’s presidency

“So it’s something that my wife and I own, and lease to the fi rm, and it’s one of the hardest things I’ve done in life, but also one of the most enjoyable. I never imagined I’d become a commercial developer but I had a willing tenant, and if you surround yourself by people who actually know what they’re doing, it’s possible.”

With the building project in hand, Morry decided it was time to devote some of his time to supporting the legal profession and was elected to the Law Society Council in 2009.

“I’m embarrassed by the fact that I didn’t give the Society more attention as a younger lawyer, because I now recognise its great value,” he said.

“My advice to anyone in the profession is to understand better what the Law Society does. It has so many roles, regulatory and membership.”

In October, 2013 he became President, with his term fi nishing 15 months later and heralding the start of the presidency now running for the calendar year.

One of the issues reviewed by the Law Society during his time at the helm was mandatory sentencing.

“It was the era when people were very concerned about the ‘one punch’ situations and rightly so, but I am a vehement believer in the fact that investing the judiciary with discretion is the only equitable and fair way in which to sentence a person for a criminal offence, because mandatory sentencing takes away the capacity to take into account individual circumstances.

“It’s essentially a decision by parliament to involve itself in the sentencing process in every single matter of a particular ilk that comes before the courts, knowing nothing of the individual circumstances. There are some classic examples from the US, who interestingly are well into the process of undoing mandatory sentencing because it led to over-representation of people in prison, of terrible travesties with regard to mandatory sentencing.”

Undoubtedly the biggest issue on the agenda during his presidency was the State Government’s proposed reforms to compulsory third party insurance.

“What was proposed was a huge erosion of, until then, a common law right to sue in negligence for your injuries arising from a motor vehicle accident. Whereas we were quite open to tweaks and changes because law ought to be improved on, if people were perceived to be being over compensated at the bottom end of the scale, so to speak – I always had a view that they probably under-compensated the upper end of the scale with very serious injuries – we were perfectly open to speaking about the bottom end. However, what was embarked upon by the government was a wholesale alteration. “The fi rst iteration, a green paper, suggested a ‘no fault’ scheme. What in fact happened was the State of South Australia had signed an inter-governmental agreement with the Federal Government that in order to receive NDIS funding, it would introduce a ‘no fault’ scheme.

“But ultimately what happened was the ‘no fault’ scheme was introduced only in respect of catastrophic injuries, and the Society’s research showed that was about 10 to 15 such motor vehicle accidents per annum resulting in catastrophically injured people who, for example, have quadriplegia, paraplegia, brain damage, and so forth; so the most seriously injured. And the Lifetime Support Scheme was established. “However, what the reform then did was to emasculate dramatically every entitlement to an injured person who wasn’t catastrophically injured. To this day, our government continues to talk about the Lifetime Support Scheme, and that might be now 100 people, some of whom are in it temporarily not permanently, but there’s probably six or seven thousand people per annum who have an injury that is not catastrophic, and it’s those tens of thousands of people who have lost out. “In what was probably a fi rst for South Australia, the big fi rms got together through the Society. An executive committee was formed comprising members from the Society and also the South Australian Bar Association and the Australian Lawyers’ Alliance (SA), that is still a standing committee to this day. “We very aggressively sought to educate the South Australian public as to what was going on, and we got to a point leading up to the election of being quite active in placing advertisements and billboard ads, letter drops and so forth. It was probably the fi rst time that we engaged in a political way with a campaign that was run.”

As Morry revealed, while he relished the opportunity to lead the Law Society during this important campaign, the long hours required during his 15 months as President eventually took a toll on his health, and he was “looking down the barrel” of renal failure due to an inherited condition.

But another remarkable chapter in his life was about to unfold.

To read the full transcript go to www.lawsocietysa.asn.au. The original interview was conducted by Lindy McNamara on 2 June, 2017. B