WORKPLACE CULTURE
HOW TO DEAL WITH THE ‘QUERULANT CLIENT’ KALYNA BECKER
Kalyna is one of a team of 30 students working at the Adelaide Law School’s free legal advice services as part of her final year law studies. These services provide important justice access avenues for those many people in our community who don’t qualify for legal aid and can’t afford a lawyer. Perhaps not surprisingly, some of those clients fall into the querulant category, and pose some interesting ethical and professional challenges for our clinics and our students, just as they do for all practitioners. This article looks at the issue of the querulant litigant from the lens of managing both the client, and their impact on the legal system.
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rofessional ethics and service obligations require that all clients are treated with respect, and as student advisors we actively listen and give legal consideration to their matters. But how do we manage these requirements when dealing with the chronic complainer, “querulant” client? My interest in this topic was sparked while assisting a client who made a sweeping assertion that she had been “wronged” with little to no basis for the claim. The client had already visited several public agencies and offices to raise this issue, and after being told that the complaint was unsubstantiated on multiple occasions, she visited on of Adelaide Law School’s free legal advice services.
WHO IS A QUERULENT? In law, a ‘querulent’ is a person who obsessively feels wronged. As a result, querulents pursue recourse by contacting public agencies and seeking legal advice in relation to petty issues. Australian
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psychiatrists, Paul Mullen and Grant Lester have described querulous behaviour as a: …totally disproportionate investment of time and resources in grievances that grow steadily from the mundane to the grandiose… These clients are characterised by: …the unusually persistent pursuit of a personal grievance in a manner seriously damaging to the individual’s economic, social, and personal interests, and disruptive to the functioning of the courts and/or other agencies attempting to resolve the claims.1 The client that I was assisting had a grievance with a utilities provider, and believed it was her “duty” to “seek justice” because she considered that she was not the only person being “robbed”. This logic is consistent with the literature which suggests that querulents often assert that their conduct is in the public interest rather than their own.2 From my experience, there are two
key reasons why querulants frame their grievances as being in the public interest: 1. To justify the time, effort and personal sacrifice that the pursuit of their complaint requires. 2. To add legitimacy to their complaint. According to literature on the topic the effort that querulents dedicate to their complaints is usually disproportionate to the merits of the complaint. In the case of my client, she had already raised the issue with several agencies and public figures who declined to entertain the matter. In framing the issue as being in the public interest, I believe that the client was trying to augment her appeal for our help. While I am cognisant of the danger in pathologising querulants, I do also think that their ‘public good’ excuse is symptomatic of the psychiatric diagnosis of querulous paranoia which has been characterised by . …a relentless, persistent and single minded pursuit of justice for real or imaginary wrongs through complaint, claims, petitioning of authorities, litigation and sometimes threats and actual violence to self or others. It takes place over years. At the core is an incorrigible belief by the person that they have been victimised and that this is a typical example of the way they have been treated by the world.3 Another common characteristic of this condition is that querulants make an issue grander than it is by linking it to “natural justice” and rights-based legislation that is not necessarily relevant. In their obsession they elevate their grievance to a point where it is no longer a legal issue but breach of human rights
