Search
This area does not yet contain any content.
Justinian News

Potty Mouth Solicitor Dispatched ... NSW Court of Appeal takes dim view of solicitor who laced his correspondence with disrespectful insults ... Insufficiently professional ... Arrived from Greece with only his underpants ... No contrition ... Anthony Kanaan files ... Read more >>

Politics Media Law Society


The End Of The Affair ... Lord Moloch’s bid for more Fox News fans … The Wall Street Journal rallies the MAGA base …Will the old rogue abandon his journalists? … Is “bawdy” the right word here? … The Deep State plumbs the depths … John and Stanley Roth’s generosity to loving causes ... Read on >> 

RIP Tom Lehrer

Free Newsletter
Justinian Columnists

Suing for defamation - it's such a good idea ...Federal Court of Australia ... Sydney barrister loses bid for extension of time to bring appeal over decision allowing Giles George to intervene to seek an equitable lien over costs ... Falling out between barrister and firm after successful defamation action ... No error or procedural unfairness ... From Stephen Murray at the Gazette of Law & Journalism ... Read more >> 

Blow the whistle

 

News snips ...


The Groths ... Victorian politician brings early privacy action against Murdoch rag and Vic Health Minister ... Claims of sexual relationship with teenager, now his wife ... Will the media defences apply? ... Is this journalism? ... Is it news? ... Field day awaits ... More from the AFR >>

Justinian's Bloggers

Postcard from London ... Summertime - And the living' is easy ... Votes for 16-year olds ... Paralegal's theft by pen ... Spy helping British intelligence from his job at Border Force ... Super-injunction comes out of the shadows ... Feed them strawberries and cream ... Floyd Alexander-Hunt files from Blighty ... Read more >> 

"I've stopped six wars in the last - I'm averaging about a war a month. But the last three were very close together. India and Pakistan, and a lot of them. Congo was just and Rwanda was just done, but you probably know I won't go into it very much, because I don't know the final numbers yet. I don't know. Numerous people were killed, and I was dealing with two countries that we get along with very well, very different countries from certain standpoints. They've been fighting for 500 years, intermittently, and we solved that war. You probably saw it just came out over the wire, so we solved it ..."

President Donald Trump at a meeting in Scotland with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer ... July 28, 2025 ... Read more flatulence ... 


Justinian Featurettes

Home Duties ... The dumping of Attorney General Mark Dreyfus ... Behind the scenes ... Bastardry among the brothers ... Unfinished business ... Family law, privacy ... Considerable policy and legislative results ... Here's Michelle Rowland as AG ... What are her priors? ... Polly Peck reports from the Gallery ... Read more >> 


Justinian's archive

The Abbott era ... Attorney General Bookshelves Brandis gives a presser to announce the appointment of Michelle Gordon to replace her husband on the High Court ... Ducking on the question of judicial retirement age ... Three cheers for constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians ... Another idea that went nowhere ... Justinian's Archive ... April 14, 2015 ... Read more >> 


 

 

« Tassie Tiger's Last Race | Main | Leon Zwier »
Monday
Jul172023

How to Kill a Client

Big Law ... Murder, money and misogyny ... Dealing with an unspeakable client ... Too much testosterone ... Crime thriller from Joanna Jenkins - someone who knows where the bodies are buried ... Book review from Anna Kretowicz  

Creating entertaining, original stories out of the goings-on of lawyers at law firms is no easy feat. 

It's hard not to play to stereotypes or over-egg the excitement (or not) of life as a lawyer, but Joanna Jenkins in her debut novel, How to Kill A Client, finds the sweet spot. 

Jenkins' own experience in a Brisbane office of Big Law infuses the thrilling whodunnit with close-to-the-bone believability. 

The fictitious firm is Howard Greene and the story is told from the perspective of three women: Viv, the only female partner who is increasingly worried about maintaining her position; Ruth, a visiting partner from Sydney, struggling with the recent loss of her husband; and Anne, the wife of the murdered man, Gavin Jones, who lies at the centre of it all. 

Jones was the in-house lawyer of Howard Greene's biggest payday client. As the novel pans out, it becomes clear that Jones thrived off his ability to manipulate others and be cock of the boys' club walk. 

If his style of operation at work was enough to make him unbearable - evident early in the novel by his not-so-subtle attempt to pass off Viv's work as his own - then his character at home adds another layer of disagreeable sliminess. 

Jenkins deals with domestic violence all too graphically - in what is a reminder that relationships are not always what they seem on the surface. 

The author deftly switches between the lives of the three women to lead the reader through the mystery, Cluedo-style, using each perspective to develop the plot and its characters. 

At least this reader was kept guessing for quite a while, and Jenkins does an excellent job at breadcrumbing and dropping red herrings throughout to keep the pages turning. 

Whodunnits often run the danger of too much plot, not enough character. Jenkins' experience and knowledge of life at Big Law enables her to avoid that lopsidedness. 

She writes: 

"To Ruth, the Brisbane office had always been a haze of coal, rugby and beer. The Brisbane partners stood around at national partner events in a circle of testosterone, their hips thrust forward, their arms crossed, exchanging manly stories about the dinosaurs they'd slain the week before. That, at least, was what their stories sounded like to Ruth: a bottomless jug of hubris." 

A sharply observed truth. 

Eminently readable, How to Kill a Client is an uncomfortable depiction of Big Law (minus the murder, of course). A strong debut, and hopefully more to come. 

How to Kill A Client, Joanna Jenkins. Allen & Unwin 


Reader Comments

There are no comments for this journal entry. To create a new comment, use the form below.
Editor Permission Required
You must have editing permission for this entry in order to post comments.