Justice Guy Parker was concerned Mr Pham had a hand in preparing his wife’s affidavit, including by directing his university-aged daughter to assist, but was not confident the court had received a “full account of the circumstances” behind the alleged misconduct.

“It is sufficient to say that the affidavits by Mr Pham leave questions unanswered and challenges, including challenges as to credit, available,” Justice Parker said in his written reasons.

The Phams were pulled into Supreme Court litigation with a former friend of the family who provided them with about $2 million, some of which was used to purchase a commercial building in Five Dock.

The rest of the loan was supposedly to assist the Phams with financial difficulty after they faced an “extraordinarily persistent” vendor in proceedings that concerned the purchase of a residential property.

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The friend filed proceedings after interest payments on her loan ceased, the Five Dock property fell vacant, and control by an incorporated company set up to purchase the property became deadlocked.

The proceedings were settled three days into the hearing, but concerns were raised about the preparation of Mrs Pham’s affidavit because some parts appeared identical to Mr Pham’s.

Mrs Pham also appeared to have used “sophisticated language” in his affidavit despite Mr Pham submitting that her principal language was Vietnamese and her knowledge of English was “vocational” only.

Mr Pham denied preparing his wife’s affidavit and instead told the court he had asked his daughter to interview and prepare it herself. While she holds no legal qualifications, the daughter appeared to have worked at Andy Pham Lawyers in a paralegal capacity.

Apparently for the purpose of ensuring his daughter used “the correct form” for Mrs Pham’s affidavit, Justice Parker said it was clear Mr Pham had drawn her attention to his own affidavit.

“It seems strange for him to have placed so much emphasis on this point when it would have been obvious (not least from [the friend’s] affidavit) … that the proceedings were pending in this court.

“And if the point was so important, that still does not explain why it needed to be made by reference to Mr Pham’s own affidavit rather than a blank court form,” Justice Parker said.

Invited to show cause why he should not be referred to the Law Society, Mr Pham said the proceedings with the vendor had left him and his wife in a “challenging and financially difficult position” so that they were unable to afford separate counsel for them both.

He also accepted he was responsible for the “accuracy and integrity” of the document as it was one submitted to court “under his supervision”, and said an independent consultant had been engaged to review his firm’s practices. This review was not in an admissible format.

Counsel for Mr Pham added that while the use of Mr Pham’s affidavit to draft his wife’s was “erroneous and regrettable”, it did not involve “any deliberate or conscious wrongdoing on Mr Pham’s part”.

While sympathetic to the stressors the Phams were under, Justice Parker said it was harder to accept Mr Pham “could have exercised no direction or control” over his daughter’s drafting of the affidavit.

“One would expect that a solicitor in Mr Pham’s position who was delegating to a junior employee the preparation of an affidavit of a party responding to allegations against that party would, in the ordinary course, give the junior solicitor a detailed briefing about the allegations and potential lines of response.

“In the present case, the question was Mr Pham’s own wife and the employee had no legal qualifications, which would, one would have thought, only have made the need for guidance and supervision more obvious,” Justice Parker said.

Justice Parker said there was also the “sketchy nature” of affidavit evidence filed by both Mr Pham and his daughter, in that neither contained any clear statements on what was actually said.

“It is impossible not to be moved by the litigious and personal misfortunes that Mr Pham has suffered. But whether those misfortunes are sufficient to mitigate the need for disciplinary action, or to make disciplinary sanctions necessary, are not questions [that] should be answered now by the court,” Justice Parker said.

“They should be left to the Law Society to consider in the whole context of the case, including the results of any further investigation which the society may choose to conduct.”

The case is Potocki v Pham [2025] NSWSC 229 (20 March 2025).