He was one of the country’s most celebrated silks. Then he defrauded pensioner scam victims

Norman O’Bryan once rubbed shoulders with a future prime minister as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and later sat on the board of prestigious private school Carey Baptist Grammar for a decade.

As one of the country’s top commercial lawyers, he ran lawsuits for the corporate watchdog that produced case law that benefited thousands of Australians, while at the same time overseeing private tutoring groups for disadvantaged high school students.

Today, he pleaded guilty to attempted fraud.

It was the final step in the downfall of the scion of one of Melbourne’s most esteemed legal dynasties.

The son and grandson of Supreme Court judges entered his plea after being caught overcharging members of the Banksia Securities class action – many of whom had already lost their life savings of more than $1 million.

O’Bryan had been the barrister for the class action claimants and a funder of the action and was representing victims of a financial collapse that wiped out $100 million in investments by mainly elderly Australians.

The class action was settled for $64 million in 2017, but not before it sparked questions from claimants about the large fees charged by the lawyers running the case, including O’Bryan.

An investigation into the fees charged, requested by the court, later found that O’Bryan and others involved in litigating the case had added fees to the class action claimants’ legal bill that were not warranted.

While there was much said about O’Bryan’s many important contributions in court on Thursday, the retired nurse whose queries resulted in the attempted overcharging being uncovered did not spare O’Bryan’s reputation in the same way.

“I don’t understand how a lawyer of such high standing, he was Queen’s Counsel, could think that he might get away with such deception,” Wendy Botsman told the court.

“I was subjected to a deliberate campaign of intimidation, threats about my home, a process server at my door, a countersuit filed against me for the sole purpose of pressuring me to abandon a legitimate appeal. The stress caused me to develop shingles.”

Another claimant, Keith Pitman told the court through his victim impact statement that O’Bryan’s conduct had a lasting impact on him.

“I am 90 years old and have been retired for 25 years. This has put a dark shadow on our latter years of retirement. I feel like it has been a slow-motion robbery,” Pitman, who also publicly raised objections to O’Bryan’s fees, said.

Michael Stanton, SC, for the Director of Public Prosecutions told the court the offending occurred over a long period and included fees that O’Bryan must have known he could not charge his clients for, including when he had been overseas or working all day in court on other cases.

O’Bryan – who has been bailed throughout the proceedings – watched on silently supported by his wife and his son, a member of the Victorian Bar.

The court heard that O’Bryan had been declared bankrupt, struck off from being a lawyer and handed back in his licence to practise law and his Order of Australia for contributions to charities.

O’Bryan once enjoyed an incredible career, first as a solicitor at top-tier firm MinterEllison before joining the Bar in 1993.

Between 2001 and 2004, O’Bryan wowed as senior counsel assisting the HIH royal commission, which probed wrongdoing by those responsible for the insurance company’s catastrophic $5 billion collapse.

O’Bryan was also one of the corporate watchdog’s go-to silks, despite the much lower fees barristers receive for these cases.

One of O’Bryan’s legal feats was his work in helping ASIC catch notorious conman Craig Gore in a civil court matter known as ASIC v ActiveSuper.

O’Bryan was able to convince the court that Gore – a property developer accused of raising millions from investors for his own personal spending – was the ultimate controlling mind of the scheme.

The case was important because Gore had used Cayman Island companies to hide his identity, but O’Bryan convinced the court of Gore’s culpability paving the way for future cases looking to pin the blame on Australians using companies offshore to conceal their involvement.

In 2016, O’Bryan was awarded the Victorian Bar’s Ron Merkel QC Award for pro bono work.

O’Bryan’s good character was also supported by a flurry of positive references for the court including from Allan Myers, KC, Philip Crutchfield, KC, and leading company director and former Monash University chancellor Simon McKeon.

O’Bryan’s good character and incredible career now stood in contrast with his criminal conduct, O’Bryan’s barrister Neil Clelland told the court.

“Mr O’Byan’s loss of professional standing has been complete,” he said. “He can no longer practise law, and realistically, he has no hope of doing so ever again.

“It was a most public fall from grace.”

O’Bryan was once a popular figure in legal, business and arts circles, spinning tales of his legal cases and his time at Oxford, where Tony Abbott was a classmate.

However, the court heard that since 2018, O’Bryan had been shunned socially and professionally. He was even ousted from a free tutoring group he set up for disadvantaged high school students and no longer attends the sporting clubs he was a member of for years.

The suffering of O’Bryan, however, stands next to that of his victims and their families, who now know what a strong lawyer O’Bryan could be.

As Botsman told the court: “Being involved in the Banksia case was one of the most difficult experiences of my life. I was made to feel like a target simply for raising a concern that the court later confirmed was well-founded.

“It remains that people who raise legitimate concerns, particularly elderly people with modest means, must be able to do so without being subjected to the kind of tactics that were directed at me.”

O’Bryan will be sentenced at a later date.

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