Jeff Sher interview 18 November 2009

I think juries in particular expect a little bit of passion when you're appearing for somebody. You've got to be objective but you end up appearing because the Bar rules demand it for a lot of unpopular causes. I mean, there's two causes for which I've appeared over recent years, which were unpopular in the extreme. One was as senior counsel for Phillip Morris in a lot of tobacco litigation. That was not a popular cause. But I was able to be totally objective about the cases and we had a great deal of success for them. The other one in very recent times is rather amusing because it's still ongoing so I'd better not name any names or descend into much detail but people would have heard of Operation Wickenby which is a very expensive joint enterprise by a number of government agencies in relation to tax evasion. I was asked to confer with an accountant who practised out of Switzerland who was behind a lot of the tax avoidance schemes that the government didn't like. He was so terrified of what might happen to him if he came back to Australia that I had to go to France to confer with him. Appearing for people involved in massive tax avoidance is not a popular cause either, but again I was able to treat the matter totally objectively.

I hope he picked up the tab for your airfare and accommodation.

Well, more than that. I didn't really want to go, and I said to the solicitor, well if I'm going to fly to France, he's got to pay me for all my time away from Melbourne and I want two tickets, not one, so I could take my wife with me. Well, he was happy to pay apparently.

I guess it's one of the perks of the job every now and again that comes up.

One of the very few, I've got to add.

With those early years, you did a lot of murder cases and you had, I guess, it should be described as a broad practice, shouldn't it really? Because strictly speaking, it was, wasn't it?

Well, when you started the Bar in those days, you couldn't afford really to specialise. You just had to take whatever was offering and that's what I did. But I quickly found myself gravitating towards civil jury work and in particular a lot of personal injury work.

When did defamation start becoming a special string to your bow, because of course that is what you're very well known for?

Well, if you're a common lawyer and a jury advocate, you're inevitably going to be asked to do cases that involve juries. Defamation is par excellence a jury-type of case and so I started to be briefed as a junior in defamation cases and gravitated as a silk towards some of the more interesting and prominent ones. It's got everything really, it's got human drama, it's got intellectual challenges like you wouldn't believe because the hair-splitting that goes on in defamation cases on the procedural and legal side is amazing, and indeed there are a lot of defamation specialists who have hardly ever done a trial. They've spent all their careers arguing these interlocutory skirmishes, but I suppose it was a sort of natural progression.

Conducted for the Victorian Bar oral history project by Juliette Brodsky, and filmed by Stewart Carter on 18 November 2009