A Lawyer Delays His Disciplinary Hearing. Must the Disciplinary Committee Sit and Wait?

A Lawyer Delays His Disciplinary Hearing. Must the Disciplinary Committee Sit and Wait?

What happens when a lawyer accused of professional misconduct keeps finding excuses not to show up to answer for it?

by GK Ganesan September 1, 2026 343 Views

When “I need more time” becomes the last refuge of an advocate who has run out of defences — and why Malaysia’s Disciplinary Committees must learn to say, “No.”

An opening hypothetical

A client lodges a complaint with the Advocates and Solicitors Disciplinary Board. Her solicitor, she says, has withheld RM80,000 of her money. The Board appoints a Disciplinary Committee (‘DC’).

Hearing one: counsel asks for an adjournment. A death in the family. Granted.

Hearing two: a medical certificate appears, filed the night before.

Hearing three: new counsel has “just come on board” and needs time to read the file.

Hearing four: the solicitor offers to repay everything within thirty days. Could the inquiry stand down while that happens?

Eighteen months pass. The client was defrauded once. Now she wonders if she is being defrauded a second time — by the very process meant to protect her.

Every excuse, on its own, sounds fair.

Bereavement is real.

Illness is real.

But each is also a favourite tool of the practised delayer.

A Committee that cannot tell the two apart stops being a Disciplinary Committee at all.

The statutory clock

Discipline for Malaysian lawyers runs on two texts: the Legal Profession Act 1976, and the Legal Profession (Disciplinary Proceedings) Rules 2017.

A complaint gets screened first. If there is cause, it goes to a Disciplinary Committee for inquiry.¹The DC conducts the inquiry, records its findings, and reports to the Disciplinary Board with the recommendation authorised by the Act. The Board determines the eventual disciplinary outcome – anything from dismissal to striking off.²

Before making a final order adverse to the advocate and solicitor, the Board must afford an opportunity for the lawyer to be heard.³ Either side can then appeal.⁴

Here is the part that matters most: there is a clock. The Committee must finish its hearing and file its report within four months of being appointed.⁵

The DC may adjourn an inquiry, but should do so judicially, having regard to notice, the explanation, the history of the case, and prejudice to all concerned.⁶ Need more time? If more time is needed, the DC must apply in writing to the Chairman of the Disciplinary Board, stating its grounds. The DB’s Chairman may allow the prescribed extension, and subsequent extensions require the same formal route.⁷

If the necessary extension is not granted, the Rules provide for consequences affecting the Committee’s continuation and may require its replacement; the complaint itself is not thereby extinguished.⁸

And if a party fails to turn up despite proper notice, the Committee may just proceed without them.⁹

Notice what this never says: that “an extension is automatic”. Four months is the default.

Anything beyond needs a fresh, reasoned request to a named person — and a Committee still stuck after repeated extensions can be dissolved.

The law already expects some inquiries to need managing, not simply waiting out.

Master of its own procedure — but not master of fairness

A Disciplinary Committee is not a court. But it decides whether a person can go on holding themselves out as fit to handle other people’s money — and natural justice treats that question just as seriously.

The governing principle

A tribunal runs its own procedure. But that power has limits.

In Re Enoch and Zaretzky, Bock & Co’s Arbitration, an arbitrator refused an adjournment in a way that shut a party out of answering the case against him.

The Court of Appeal removed him: procedural control can never mean denying someone the chance to know, and meet, the case they face.¹⁰

Maxwell v Keun puts the flip side just as plainly: a refusal to adjourn will be overturned where it causes real injustice with no matching harm to the other side.

Where it causes no such injustice, the tribunal is not just entitled to refuse — it is obliged to.¹¹

Where refusal is upheld: the Malaysian cases

Malaysian courts strike the same balance. In Pushpam Subramaniam v Majlis Peguam Malaysia & Anor, an advocate asked for a last-minute adjournment — two days’ notice — over a clashing criminal case.

The Board said no, went ahead without her, and suspended her. The High Court backed that decision: her pattern of delay justified it, and natural justice is not denied to someone who has herself turned down every earlier chance to be heard.¹²

Where refusal crosses the line: Polemis

None of this gives a Committee licence to be careless.

In R v Thames Magistrates’ Court, ex parte Polemis, a ship’s Greek master was served a summons at 10.30 a.m., alleging serious pollution with scientific evidence in dispute.

He had to answer it by 2 p.m. that same day, because his ship was due to sail.

His lawyers asked for more time. The request was refused.

He was tried and fined £5,000 within hours.

The conviction was quashed.

Lord Widgery C.J. held that the chance to present your case “necessarily extends to a reasonable opportunity to prepare” it, and that justice “must not only be done but must manifestly be seen to be done.”

He was careful to add that the magistrates were not helpless meanwhile: where a fair hearing cannot happen in the time available, “they must adjourn the matter, but they have adequate powers to see that some sensible provision is made” to protect the public interest while they wait.¹³

Reconciling the two

Polemis and Pushpam Subramaniam are two edges of the same rule. Polemis had a genuine, structural problem — three and a half hours to gather foreign-language scientific evidence. The Malaysian advocate had none of that; she had already had a fair chance, and turned it down more than once.

The real question is never “was an adjournment asked for,” but “would saying no leave this person genuinely unable to answer the case.”

If the honest answer is no, the Committee should proceed — using costs, conditions, or a firm new date, not an open-ended stay.

The Federal Court has recently said much the same, in the strongest terms: a solicitor facing any adverse finding must get notice and a real chance to be heard before the Board acts.¹⁴

Audi alteram partem — hear the other side — is not a courtesy extended when convenient.

It is the condition on which the Committee’s power to decide anything rests.

This was never a choice between fairness and speed.

Unmanaged delay is itself a form of unfairness — to the complainant, the public, and the profession the respondent still belongs to.

Telling the genuine from the tactical

Not every adjournment request is bad faith.

Genuine hospitalisation, genuine grief, a genuinely late change of lawyer — all deserve a fair hearing.

But they are also the oldest tricks in the book.

A Committee has to judge each one on the facts, not the label.

Warning signs worth watching for

A few signs are worth watching.

Timing: filed the night before, when the reason was known for weeks.

Vagueness: a bare claim of “illness,” no diagnosis, no doctor’s name — a proper certificate says who, what, and for how long.

History: one adjournment calls for patience, a pattern for suspicion. Shifting excuses, each hearing bringing a new one, tell their own story.

So does ignoring the Committee’s directions, or an unexplained failure to prepare; nobody should manufacture their own unreadiness and then plead it.

And prejudice runs both ways — fading memories, a frustrated complainant, public confidence — all belong on the scale, not as an afterthought.

Inconveniencing everyone else in the room: A DC hearing is not a quiet affair. It requires at least five human beings — three Committee members (two of them practitioners who stand to lose income by wasted hours), a respondent and his counsel, and a complainant and hers — to clear their diaries, cancel whatever else they were doing with their lives, and assemble in one room at one time. This is not a small ask.

The special case of settlement offers

Offers to repay the client need special care. A real, time-bound offer can properly shape what happens next — restitution is something the Committee may itself recommend.¹⁵

But a vague promise to “sort things out,” used to stall the inquiry indefinitely, turns discipline into a private debt-collection service.

Whether misconduct happened, and whether the money has since been repaid, are two different questions. Only the second should ever wait on a negotiation.

‘Settlement talks’, even if earnest, or a private repayment, do not determine the public disciplinary complaint.

It may be relevant to restitution, mitigation, costs, and the appropriate order that the Board makes: but it does not necessarily ‘terminate’ the inquiry.

Again, a complainant may be persuaded to withdraw a complaint, but the Bar Council may step in and continue the complaint in place of the original complainant.¹⁶ One cannot ‘negotiate’ one’s way out of a statutory complaint.

Duration: how long is too long?

A case that drags on for a year, or two, is not automatically unlawful — the Rules allow repeat extensions, but this is not without limit.

Each extension is meant to be a real decision, not a rubber stamp, and the Board can dissolve a Committee that simply cannot get on with it.¹⁷

Two to three sittings without a single day of actual evidence is itself a fact bearing on whether “reasonable grounds” for yet another extension truly exist.

Thus, when a lawyer discovers, on the eve of the hearing, that the grandmother of his fifth cousin twice removed has been hospitalised; or invokes a pre-existing, chronic condition — blood pressure, a bad back — that somehow only ever flares up on hearing dates; or simply develops, with metronomic regularity, an urgent reason to adjourn each time the file is called — the Committee is entitled to raise an eyebrow.

These excuses do not survive scrutiny.

They sit on the wrong side of the line, and the DC must weigh the competing considerations before it exercises its limited discretion either to adjourn, or — more bracingly — to proceed without him.

An adjournment decision framework

Seven questions a Committee might usefully ask:

First — was proper notice given, so the Committee could proceed without the applicant?

Second — is the reason backed by real, contemporaneous evidence, not a bare claim from the bar table?

Third — was the request made as soon as the problem arose, or only on the eve of hearing?

Fourth — does this respondent have a track record of adjournments or unexplained silence?

Fifth — who is hurt more by refusal: the respondent, or the complainant, witnesses, and the public interest?

Sixth — is there a middle path — the papers, a firm final date, costs — short of an outright adjournment?

Seventh — if the Committee itself needs more time, has an application actually gone to the Board’s Chairman under rule 15(3)?

A Committee that works through these, and writes down its reasoning, protects itself twice over — against a complaint of unfairness on appeal, and against the far worse charge that the disciplinary system has itself become a tool of delay.

Conclusion: fairness is not the same as patience without limit

The right to be heard is not up for negotiation. Real illness happens to lawyers too, so does real grief, and a genuinely late change of counsel.

A Committee that brushes past these invites exactly the rebuke Polemis handed the Thames magistrates.

But the authorities point one way. A tribunal masters its own procedure precisely so that the tribunal — not the most persistent applicant for delay — decides how a hearing runs. Complainants deserve resolution within a human timeframe.

The public deserves to know, reasonably soon, whether someone holding a practising certificate can be trusted with their money. And the profession has its own stake in cases that end with dispatch, before confidence in its ability to police its own ranks quietly rots away.

Procedural fairness is indispensable.

Delay is not a procedural right. A Disciplinary Committee that forgets the difference does no favour to the solicitor whose case it drags out — and even less to the client left waiting.

A lawyer may delay a disciplinary hearing for reasons good, bad, or somewhere in between.

What no Committee should ever do is simply sit and wait to find out which.

∞§∞

This article is written for a general readership and does not constitute technical or legal advice. Readers with legal questions are encouraged to seek independent legal advice. The author thanks KN Geetha, TP Vaani, JN Lheela, and Lydia Jaynthi at GK Legal. Our gratitude to —— of Unsplash for the image.

Claude, Anthropic’s AI, smoothed the drafting; Perplexity Pro checked the facts. The argument, the views, and the errors remain the author’s.

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A Lawyer Delays His Disciplinary Hearing. Must the Disciplinary Committee Sit and Wait?

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