Category Archives: Personal Property Securities

Slide into PowerPoint – a novice’s guide

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Are barristers the last professional presenters in the western world to adopt PowerPoint?

I made my PowerPoint début last week at a PPS Act seminar before an audience of 130 solicitors.

The feedback forms  are now in and it seems (on the statistically dubious basis of all 27 completed questionnaires) that it was a resounding success.

PowerPoint is scarcely rocket science but we’ve all seen it stuffed up too often.

So here are three suggestions that helped me:

• Get some Grade 3, 4, 5 or 6 kids to teach you the basics (really!);

• Get their grandmother to fill you in on the rest (chief of which is suggestion #3);

• Watch this video in which comedian Don McMillan does a 9 minute PowerPoint presentation on how not to do a PowerPoint presentation.

It’s funny. But it’s also excellent professional education for any lawyer ever likely to be handed the remote control to a PowerPoint projector.

Safeguard your Mareva injunction with a PPSA registration

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I have just put the finishing touches to a seminar paper I am delivering this week on the Personal Property Securities Act 2009.

My paper is not as unwieldy and dry as the PPS Act itself (is anything?) but I wouldn’t call it sexy either. I will post it on its own discrete (ie separately tabbed) page in this blog after the seminar.

For an extremely short synopsis of the PPS Act generally see my post of 10 February 2012 (which you can access by simply following the date prompts below the mugshot in the right-hand margin of this page.)

But let me take you straight to what might be the highlight for general commercial litigators with Mareva-type injunctions in their armoury (and they should be in every armoury).

Once Mareva orders (aka ‘asset preservation orders’ and ‘freezing orders’) and some analogous orders are obtained from any Australian court or tribunal it seems they can be ‘perfected’ by registration on the PPS Register.

Such registration will effectively advertise the existence of your client’s Mareva injunction to the world at large. That ‘perfection’, among other things, should constructively warn off third parties who might otherwise purchase or lend against the property in breach of a court order restraining the use and/or disposal of that property.

This new tool lies buried in reg 5.3(c) of the PPS Regulations. I am not aware of it having been used since the PPSA regime started on 30 January 2012.

Is this history waiting to be made or has it been made already?

Anyone?