Urgent case nullified after lawyer’s brazen forgery

The High Court in Malawi has recently been faced with an extraordinary problem: one morning Judge Trouble Kalua granted an urgent interim application, without notice to the other side, only to hear a few hours later that the firm that had brought the matter, and whose managing partner had signed the court documents, knew nothing at all about it. How was this possible? What had happened? Carmel Rickard explains the story and asks whether it’s possible for such a situation to arise in South Africa. Read about in her A Matter of Justice column on the Legalbrief site.