Peter Leslie is an Australian lawyer based in Melbourne, Victoria, whose practice centred on insurance and occupational health and safety law. He was admitted to the Victorian bar in 1977, worked at Middletons Moore & Bevins in Melbourne, and later joined Holman Fenwick & Willan as a partner.
Background
Peter Leslie's documented life is centred in Melbourne, the capital of the Australian state of Victoria, where he studied law and built his professional career. His documented spoken language is English.
The University of Melbourne, where he studied law, was established by an Act of the Victorian Parliament in 1853 and was the first university in Victoria. Its law teaching began in 1857, which means legal education was among the university's earliest fields of study.
Education
Leslie holds a Bachelor of Laws with Honours from the University of Melbourne. The university began with a liberal arts course and added a law school in 1857, followed by engineering and medicine in the early 1860s.
Legal studies at the university were part of the Quadrangle tradition, and the Law Faculty was formally created in 1873, when the university council moved to separate law from arts. Melbourne Law School initially offered LL.B. degrees and stopped accepting students into that programme in 2007, when it began offering only the J.D.
Career
Leslie's documented legal career was centred on Middletons Moore & Bevins in Melbourne, Victoria. The firm was described as tracing its history back to the 1800s and as the product of a merger between three prominent firms. In 2001 its two partnerships separated, leaving a Melbourne firm that kept the same name.
His documented specialisations included insurance and occupational health and safety, alongside banking and finance, commercial and general litigation, companies and securities, intellectual property, product liability, resources and energy, taxation and revenue, and trade practices. In Victoria, the primary occupational health and safety legislation is the Occupational Health and Safety Act 2004, which sets out the obligations of both employers and employees.
The firm later merged with the United States firm K&L Gates, with the merger taking effect on 1 January 2013, and the Middletons name was dropped. Leslie later joined the Melbourne shipping and transport group of Holman Fenwick & Willan as a partner, when the firm's Australian office had only recently opened with four founding partners. Having worked for Middletons in Melbourne, he focused there on seafarers' personal injury claims, dust disease and public liability litigation.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Gavin Valley, head of Holman Fenwick & Willan's Melbourne office, said that Leslie is widely recognised as one of Australia's leading lawyers in seafarers' injury claims and has for many years been involved in defending claims arising from asbestos exposure.
