Odtojan's Mirror Test: What Would Happen If We Did This to Them?
- 13 hours ago
- 9 min read
Updated: 39 minutes ago
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
- George Orwell, Animal Farm
Table of Contents
The Most Honest Test Anyone can Apply
"Take the process applied to two lawyers. Turn it around. Apply it to the people who applied it. Ask: would that be acceptable? This is the mirror test, and the reflection is revealing"
There is a test that can cut through every legal argument, every procedural justification, and every institutional defence faster than any case authority.
It is called the mirror test.
The mirror test is not a legal doctrine. It is a simple way for ordinary people to understand whether a process is consistent, principled, and capable of being applied equally to everyone.
Take the process that was applied to a person. Turn it around. Apply it to the people who applied it. Then ask would that be acceptable?
If the answer is no, if the process, when reflected back at its architects, produces an outcome that is plainly absurd, plainly unjust, or plainly incompatible with how a functioning society operates, then the process itself is wrong.
Not wrong for that person. Wrong. Full stop.
Let us apply the mirror test to what happened to two Australian Lawyers in NSW, Ms Odtojan and Mr Bryl and to the law firm they built together.
Turn the Tables - What Happens When Power Faces the Mirror?
Imagine the following.
Ms Griswold, Director of the Law Society's Professional Standards Department, receives a referral. Alleging possible conduct breaches.
The referral is not a finding. No evidence has been tested. No tribunal has made any determination. The allegations have never been adjudicated.
The OLSC routes it , not through Chapter 5, the lawful pathway with NCAT safeguards and independent findings, but through Chapter 3. As a source of information.
Then they wait. Quietly. For Ms Griswold's next practising certificate renewal application.
When she applies, the Law Society activates the referral.
The letter that arrives does not say: we will investigate. It says: you have misconduct, your practising certificate is placed in force, here are fifteen conduct issues, tell us what you have done to correct your conduct and what conditions you propose.
She is already guilty. In the opening paragraph.
She responds comprehensively, seventeen pages, twenty-five bundles, approximately 1,300 documents. She gives formal notice that the process is unlawful. She demands the author of the letter recuse themselves. She writes to the Attorney General Michael Daley, the Minister responsible for the Uniform Law, attaching everything. She writes to every Council member at their publicly listed emails.
She is met with silence.
Before the Law Society responds to her, the Attorney General's office responds first. The letter, signed by MP Hugh McDermott, does not address the unlawful process. It calls the use of the word "misconduct" a typographical error, and introduces, for the first time, two phrases that appear nowhere in the Legal Profession Uniform Law:
"Alleged prior misconduct" and "Alleged prior conduct."
Non-statutory. Undefined. Invented, to replace a word used as established fact with something vaguer and less legally accountable.
Shortly after her letters to the Council, she notices the Council members' publicly listed email addresses have been deleted from the Law Society's website. All of them. No announcement. No explanation.
Ten months pass. No response. No clarification. No NCAT process. No criteria assessment. Nothing.
Then, by chance, she discovers her solicitor profile has been deleted from the public register. No notice. No decision. Just gone.
She then discovers her Law Society membership, held for fifteen years, has been cancelled. So has her husband's (also a solicitor, also subject to the same referral, and also subject to the same undisclosed internal process conducted by the Law Society, without notice, without decision, and without any communication to either of them). Despite the Law Society's own letters stating that solicitor member services remained available to them
She cannot renew her practising certificate. She cannot access the professional indemnity scheme. She cannot comply with her obligations as principal. The foundation of her practice has been removed, silently, without her knowledge — while she was being told everything remained in place.
She writes again. Urgently. Asking for explanations, decisions, particulars.
Ten months after the first letter, the Law Society responds. Here is what she receives after responding with seventeen pages and 1,300 documents:
Thank you. Your letter has been 'considered'.
One sentence. Then, new allegations. About public posts on her website. Outside the original referral. No particulars. No attachments. Just fresh allegations added to an already unanswered pile.
She asks again for clarification, jurisdiction, NCAT. She receives a short email, not answering anything, simply repeating the invented phrases borrowed from the Attorney General's office: alleged prior misconduct, alleged prior conduct.
Then on 21 May, the decision arrives.
Nothing answered. Nothing evidenced. Nothing determined through any lawful process.
Not fit and proper. Practising certificate refused. Name removed from the public registry. Everything built, gone.
No NCAT. No findings. No tested evidence. No Chapter 5. No statutory basis for the phrases that founded the decision.
Just: we formed views.
Apply it to the Law Society's Council Members
Apply the same process to every member of the Law Society's Council membrs who adopted Ms Griswold's decision she authored as evidenced in her Memorandum, a decision drafted on 23 May 2025, apparently adopted on 29 May 2025, and issued on 30 May 2025 but the decision document has a save date of 21 May 2025..
Apply it to each of them individually. Send each one a letter. Tell them allegations have been raised. Tell them to explain what they have done to correct their conduct. Render each of them not fit and proper based on those allegations, allegations that have never been tested, never been adjudicated, and never been the subject of any findings.
Watch what happens to the Law Society of NSW when its entire Council is rendered unfit simultaneously, without process, without evidence, without NCAT, on the basis of allegations and formed views.
Apply It to the Attorney General and MP
NSW Attorney General Michael Daley, the Minister responsible for the Uniform Law, and MP Hugh McDermott have been identified in Ms Odtojan's public disclosures as allegedly enabling or participating in actions of creating a narrative of 'alleged prior misconduct.”
Imagine a referral is made. Alleging possible conduct breaches.
It is routed, not through the proper investigative pathway, but as a source of information under a different chapter. It waits for his next renewal of something. Then it is activated.
A letter arrives: tell us what you have done to correct your conduct.
He asks for the process. Asks for the evidence. Asks for the jurisdictional basis.
The response: we formed views. We have discretion. You were aware your propriety was in question.
His career is gone. His livelihood is gone. Everything he has built, gone. On the basis of allegations. Formed views. Discretion.
No hearing. No evidence. No findings.
What Would Society Look Like?
If this process, the one applied to Ms Odtojan and Mr Bryl, were applied universally, society would not function.
Because the process, applied universally, means:
Any person can be rendered unfit for any role, based on allegations alone;
The allegations need not be tested;
The evidence need not be produced;
The process need not comply with the statutory scheme;
The decision-maker need not give reasons consistent with the only relevant authority;
And the person subjected to it has no accessible, affordable review right, because the proper tribunal has been deliberately bypassed.
If that process were applied to lawyers, it would destroy the legal profession overnight. Every practitioner would be vulnerable to any referral, from any source, routed through any convenient chapter, activated at any convenient moment.
If it were applied to politicians, no parliament would survive a single term.
If such a process were capable of being applied to judges, politicians, regulators, lawyers, or any other public official, few would regard it as an acceptable foundation for decision-making.
That is because public confidence depends upon consistent standards, transparent processes, and accountability. A process that would be rejected if applied to those exercising public power cannot become acceptable simply because it is applied to someone with less of it.
The Principle That Must Follow
The reason we do not apply that process to the Attorney General, MPs, The Law Society directors and council members, and judges is not because they are more important than Ms Odtojan and Mr Bryl.
It is because that process is wrong.
It is wrong when applied to them. And it is equally wrong when applied to anyone else.
The rule of law does not have a tier system. It does not have a category of people to whom proper process applies and another category to whom formed views and discretion suffice.
Either the process is lawful for everyone, or it is lawful for no one. Otherwise it is what is decribed in George Orwell's Animal farm: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
What was done to Ms Odtojan and Mr Bryl, if done to any those in positions of power such as Attorney General, any Law Society director, any Supreme Court judge, would produce immediate, unanimous outrage. Royal commissions would be called. Careers would end. Accountability would be demanded.
The silence that has met what happened to Ms Odtojan and Mr Bryl is not evidence that what happened to them was acceptable.
It is evidence that the people with the power to speak have chosen not to.
The Question That Cannot Be Avoided
If you would not accept this process being applied to yourself, if you would not accept being rendered not fit and proper on the basis of a referral, formed views, and discretion, without Chapter 5, without NCAT, without tested evidence, without findings, then you cannot defend its application to anyone else.
Ms Griswold cannot defend it. The Council cannot defend it. The Attorney General cannot defend it. Acting Justice Griffiths cannot defend it.
Because none of them would accept it for themselves.
And a process that is only acceptable when applied to others, but never to oneself, is not a lawful process.
It is power. Exercised without accountability. Against people who had less of it.
That is not the rule of law.
That is its opposite.
The Kafkaesque Reality
There is a word for what Ms Odtojan and Mr Bryl experienced. Kafkaesque.
From Franz Kafka's The Trial, a story about a person prosecuted by a faceless authority for a crime never named, under a process never explained, toward an outcome never justified.
But this was not fiction.
The Law Society came with a wrecking ball of lawlessness. And Ms Odtojan and Mr Bryl, two lawyers, a husband and wife, principals of a legal practice, were left to navigate the chaos of that destruction while simultaneously:
Honouring their duties as solicitors;
Running and protecting their law firm;
Representing and protecting their clients;
Meeting every legal obligation placed upon them as principals;
And fighting, at every step, to understand a process that was never explained, never lawfully grounded, and never honestly conducted.
They were the victims. And yet they were treated as the problem.
They were being destroyed from the outside, and expected to function perfectly on the inside.
That is the human cost that no legal submission can fully capture. The distress of not knowing from one day to the next whether you are still a lawyer. The weight of protecting your clients while your own professional existence is being dismantled without notice, without process, and without any proven case.
That is not regulation.
That is a wrecking ball.
And the people swinging it have never once been asked to justify the damage.
Conclusion: Would Society Stay Silent?
Would society stay quiet if this happened to the Attorney General? To the entire Law Society Council? To Ms Griswold herself?
No. Society would not stay quiet. The profession would not stay quiet. The media would not stay quiet. Parliament would not stay quiet.
And yet, society has stayed quiet about what happened to Ms Odtojan and Mr Bryl.
Not because it is acceptable. But because to a woman of colour in law and her husband, two lawyers who built a practice together, who had the documents, had the transcripts, had the law and case authorities, and had the truth, but did not have the institutional power to make themselves heard in the forums that were supposed to hear them.
This series exists because those forums failed.
The documents are here. The transcripts are here. The law and authorities are here.
The mirror test has been applied. And, the reflection is revealing.
And it belongs on the public record.
The Odtojan Mirror Test
"If you would not accept this process applied to yourself, you cannot defend its application to anyone else."
© Marie Odtojan
This post is part of The Odtojan-Bryl Full Picture series by Odtojan Bryl Lawyers. This is a public interest disclosure based on the lived experience of lawyers Marie Odtojan and Artem Bryl, witnesses, victims, and whistleblowers who acted lawfully at all times. Information on this website is not legal advice.
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