A law firm in Melbourne has been fined more than $50,000 for exploiting a junior lawyer. The woman was underpaid, made to work up to 24-hour days, forced to share a bed with the office manager and forced to watch an ice hockey movie to understand her boss’s philosophical reasoning.
The string of exploitative acts saw Melbourne’s Magistrate Court rule law firm Erudite Legal breached workplace laws. It’s a rare use of Fair Work Act laws against unreasonable hours in the legal industry, which is known for having employees work long hours.
Magistrate Kathryn Fawcett found that Erudite required the junior lawyer to work days ranging from 12 to 18 hours, as well as two 24-hour days, all within the three weeks that she was employed.
The excessive hours were described as “egregious” and exacerbated the woman’s medical condition, made it difficult for her to arrange for her mother to return home from hospital after a serious illness and forced the first-time lawyer to work on the day of her ex-partner’s funeral. In addition, the woman was underpaid $8000.
Erudite did not defend the case and did not comply with a court order to rectify the underpayments. The magistrate called this a “striking lack of contrition” by the law firm.
“[The junior lawyer’s] time was monopolised by [Erudite] and she was isolated both physically, and in her capacity to communicate, from her family,” Fawcett said. “In all circumstances, they made her working environment so repugnant that it constituted a repudiatory breach of contract.”
Fawcett also said that forcing the junior lawyer to stay in a hotel room with her manager one night “deprived her of any form of personal autonomy or agency without any rational justification”.
The court heard that the junior lawyer’s boss and the firm’s sole shareholder, Shivesh Kuksal, would lecture her about philosophy and his superior IQ and at one point instructed the woman to watch the movie Miracle to illustrate a philosophical point.
While the woman finished the film at 3:20am, Kuksal texted her throughout to ensure she was watching, texting her the quote: “Gentlemen, you aren’t talented enough to win on talent alone…”
For more than 225 hours of work over three weeks, the firm only paid the woman $1000.
Fawcett fined the firm $22,200 for failing to pay on time and $26,640 for the unreasonable hours worked. However, she held the matter was not a serious breach as it didn’t fulfil the legal definition of “systemic” behaviour that require the involvement of one or more “other” people.
It’s unlikely the firm will pay the fine, as ASIC records show that Erudite was deregistered a couple of weeks before the ruling.
This isn’t the first time that Kuksal has been reprimanded by the law. Last year, the Supreme Court restrained him from engaging in legal practice or distributing legal documents on behalf of Erudite. This followed a 2023 decision that held Kuksald used his furniture company to hold customers’ furniture for ransom and send them threatening letters from the law firm.