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Insights recently spoke with Christopher Hill-Smith, who founded Newcastle-based law firm Appleton Law after completing his LLM (Applied Law) majoring in Wills and Estates with the College of Law. Hill-Smith talked to Insights regarding his reasons for specialising in wills and estates, the benefits of obtaining his Masters through The College of Law, and the advice he had for those interested in striking out into succession, wills and estates law. Like many of those who choose to pursue and practice law, Christopher Hill-Smith simply wanted to be able to provide solid legal advice to those embroiled in the legal system, which he had found to be frequently not readily available. |
“In many firms, a potential client does not get to ask even basic questions without ‘putting money into trust’,” observed Mr Hill-Smith. “I genuinely enjoy helping people and I wanted to be in a position to be able to assist people through the often difficult legal process.”
Having graduated from the College of Law’s LLM (Applied Law) program in 2013, he proceeded to start his own firm, specialising in criminal law, wills and estates, and succession law. He credits his Masters with progressing his career and allowing him to demonstrate expertise in areas of law in which he was passionate.
“I have always been very interested in the equity side of the law and of course, wills and trusts and all things ‘succession’ relate very much to that stream of the law,” said Mr Hill-Smith. “I decided to practice in those two areas because I believe that these days the law is very complicated and forever changing, and therefore it is simply not realistically possible to be proficient in all areas, or even in many areas of law.”
In the longer term, Christopher Hill-Smith hopes to pursue further post-graduate study to keep improving his expertise, to ensure the currency of his knowledge, and to build up his practice.
His most interesting succession case to date involved an intestacy claim. “The father had sadly died in a motor vehicle accident and did not leave a will,” said Mr Hill-Smith. “He had been divorced for over 10 years and had an acrimonious relationship with his former wife. Unfortunately the only person the court would accept to act as the administrator of his estate was his former wife, the guardian of his children.”
As one might guess, Mr Hill-Smith said it was a “difficult process” to manage the situation and all the parties involved without conflict, illustrating the deft diplomacy, empathy and pragmatism required to run a case concerning succession, wills and estates.
In relation to criminal law, Mr Hill-Smith was involved in a matter where an elderly gentleman had been charged with high range PCA a number of times and subsequently sentenced to a term of fulltime imprisonment. Fortunately for the client his mobility scooter was not capable of travelling over 10 kph and therefore did not fall within the definition of a motor vehicle. On appeal he lived to ride again!
For new graduates, Mr Hill-Smith has this advice:
“Keep studying. Obtaining your degree is only a small part of it. There is little preparation for the practicalities of acting for a client in the ‘real world’ and it by necessity it is a steep learning curve. The assistance one achieves by conversing with other lawyers and continued studying through courses such as the Masters courses run by College of Law is invaluable.”
For Mr Hill-Smith, the best career advice he has received was quite pragmatic – “make sure you get money intro trust when you are acting for clients because when the case is run, strangely the pressure on the client to ‘pay up’ suddenly evaporates!”
His first principal also led by a strong ethical example, showing him that “it is not always about money. You can sometimes achieve the greatest satisfaction by helping someone through a difficult process and knowing they are not going into debt to achieve a good result.”