Peter Rashleigh

Education

Rashleigh's documented education includes his admission to the bar in Victoria in 1971, which followed the traditional route into the Australian legal profession. Articles of clerkship, a period of training under a practising solicitor, were the established path to admission as a solicitor in Victoria, and the Articled Clerks' Society of Victoria was an organisation for trainees within that system.

He also completed the Articled Clerks Course in Melbourne as part of his continuing legal education. The course reflected the Melbourne-based training that prepared lawyers for practice in Victoria's legal profession.

Career

Peter Rashleigh was admitted to the bar in Victoria in 1971, and Melbourne became the centre of his legal career. He practised as a partner of Phillips Fox, a firm whose origins lie in a practice founded in 1864 as P.D. Phillips. By 1986 he was practising with the firm in Melbourne.

Phillips Fox later grew into one of the largest law firms in Australasia, with offices in Australia, New Zealand and Vietnam. In the mid-2000s the firm entered an exclusive alliance with DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary, one of the largest legal services organisations in the world, and adopted the name DLA Phillips Fox. Rashleigh served as the firm's chairman; he was succeeded by John Strahl, a Wellington-based partner, who became the first New Zealander to lead the firm.

Rashleigh later worked as a consultant in Melbourne with DLA Piper. For more than thirty-five years his practice covered liability and insurance law and a broad range of commercial litigation, with a particular focus on professional liability and professional indemnity insurance. He advised underwriters on policy coverage, handled claims under professional indemnity schemes, and advised government instrumentalities, including VicRoads, on liability and insurance programmes for infrastructure projects.

His litigation work included acting for the auditors of the failed Pyramid Society, a case that the firm's profile describes as among the largest civil litigation matters ever conducted in Australia. He also has presented seminars and written papers on insurance, liability law and legal ethics, and he chaired the ethics and conflicts committee of the firm.

Membership

Rashleigh's professional memberships centre on insurance and liability law. The Australian Insurance Law Association brings together lawyers and others working in insurance law, while the Australian Professional Indemnity Group focuses on professional indemnity insurance, which protects professionals against claims arising from their work. He is also associated with the Law Council of Australia, the national representative body of the Australian legal profession.

His other memberships reflect civic and regulatory involvement. He is an alumnus of the Committee for Melbourne, an organisation concerned with the civic and economic development of Melbourne. He also served as alternate chair of the Code Compliance Committee of the Financial Ombudsman Service, an external dispute resolution scheme for financial services in Australia.

• Australian Insurance Law Association , Australia

• Australian Professional Indemnity Group , Australia

• Law Council of Australia , Australia

• Alumnus

  Committee for Melbourne , Australia

• Alternate Chair of the Code Compliance Committee

  Financial Ombudsman Service , Australia

References

• DLA Piper profile of Peter Rashleigh Firm profile describing Rashleigh's position as a consultant in Melbourne, his insurance and commercial litigation practice, professional qualifications, cases, and memberships.
• NZ Herald Report on the election of John Strahl as chairman of Phillips Fox, succeeding Peter Rashleigh, and on the firm's standing as a trans-Tasman law firm.