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Daniel Aghion
on a career in social justice and equity We sat down with Daniel Aghion, a leading junior barrister in commercial litigation and recipient of the Victorian Bar’s Ron Merkel QC award – for his work in homelessness and elder law, to ask him about his experience in pro bono work and advocacy. Please provide an explanation of your career, and trajectory into your current field of practise. I completed my undergraduate degree at Monash, in Arts/Law. I completed (what was then) my articles in Melbourne, and consequently spent six months in Sydney as a first-year solicitor. My intention was always to go to the Bar. I signed the Bar roll when I was 24 and have been a barrister ever since. In the early days, I did a little bit of everything. It took some time to develop a particular practise, expertise and interest. This has developed into commercial litigation, with focus in professional negligence and property matters. Is there an aspect of the law and practise that you enjoy in particular? For me, it’s advocacy – getting up in court, and being involved in the process of persuading a judge of a particular outcome that your client is seeking. What lead you into pro bono work and advocacy? I was attracted to pro bono work for several reasons.
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First, access to justice is limited if a client does not have financial resources. In the areas of law in which I work, people who approach solicitors have money and can afford to fight in court. This is only a small percentage of the population. I am acutely aware that that there is a large number of people who do not have the ability to access the courts to achieve civil outcomes, simply because they cannot afford to do so. It was important for me to balance the paid work with the pro bono work. Second, the Bar, to its credit, makes it very easy to do. A number of pro bono programs and schemes are organised through the Bar. As barristers, we are encouraged to not only join but actively participate in them through the offering of our services. My personal recognition of the importance of pro bono work matched with the Bar’s communal facilitation of barristers providing this work to the general public. Have you seen the inequity in access to justice transpire in the civil outcomes of any of your cases? Outside of the pro bono environment, resourcing is not an issue. In commercial litigation, you have large entities who are contesting something that comes out of a corporate or commercial transaction. There may be minor inequities in that one entity is better resourced than the other, but this does not significantly impact on the outcome. In the pro bono space, however, without a doubt. The best example in the pro bono work I have done, is for tenants of public
