Alexander Pinnock is not a registered legal practitioner and can’t engage in any type of legal practice.
As an unqualified person, Mr Pinnock – who has been known to go by the names Alec Stuart and Alec Anton Stuart – also must not advertise, represent, or do anything else that states or implies that he is entitled to engage in legal practice.
We are aware of recent media interest relating to Mr Pinnock and his various entities. We are also aware that Mr Pinnock pleaded guilty in the Local Court of New South Wales to six offences relating to unqualified legal practice. Read more about this here.
Only a qualified lawyer has the knowledge, skills, training and importantly, legal protections for consumers if something goes wrong. Law practices operated by unqualified persons are not registered with the Victorian Legal Services Board. This means that people who engage an unqualified person to perform legal services for them do not enjoy certain protections that would apply if they had instead engaged a qualified legal practitioner at a legitimate law practice. This includes that, if an unqualified person does a bad job in a legal matter, the ‘client’ is not protected by having recourse to:
- a law practice’s professional indemnity insurance; or
- the Victorian Legal Services Board’s Fidelity Fund compensation scheme.
Unqualified persons purporting to be lawyers also have no entitlement to fees from clients.
We encourage you to search our Register of Lawyers to check if a lawyer is licensed to practise. The Register also contains information about their place of practice, their practising certificate type, their areas of practice and any languages they may speak.