6000 Emails Too Many

XY (a pseudonym) v Law Society of Northern Territory [2024] NTSC 32

A woman, identified only as XY, has been denied admission to practice as a solicitor and determined by a Court not to be a fit and proper person for admission to legal practice after sending a barrage of bizarre emails to the Chief Justice’s Associate of the Northern Territory and the Northern Territory Law Society.

The Legal Practitioners Admission Board had referred XY’s application for admission to the Court owing to XY’s previous diagnosis of two medical disorders and XY’s previous provision of false information to the Department of Immigration and Citizenship.

Following the referral, XY had sent in excess of 6000 emails to the Court. The emails were often sent minutes apart. The content of the communications was largely rambling and incomprehensible, frequently profane and/or contained sexual content. 

The Law Society had identified eight grounds upon which it opposed XY’s application for admission. The Law Society contended that the Court could determine that XY was not a fit and proper person on the basis of the first ground alone, being the “volume, frequency and content of emails sent by the applicant – whether the person is currently of good fame and character”. 

Many of the emails are set out in full in the judgment. 

The volume of emails sent by XY were described by the Court at [48] as “…a course of perverse, inappropriate and entirely unprofessional conduct by communication which had persisted for in excess of a year”.  The Court determined that XY was not a fit and proper person for admission to the legal profession and dismissed the application for admission.

Decision available here.