Barrister Lloyd Rayney may receive the biggest defamation payout in Australian history after winning his lawsuit against the Western Australia government over being named by police as the “prime” and “only” suspect in his wife’s 2007 murder.

Supreme court justice John Chaney found a series of press conferences by Detective Jack Lee in 2007 that named Rayney “bore an imputation” and “gave rise to a reasonable suspicion” he had murdered his wife, Corryn Rayney.

Corryn Rayney, a 44-year-old supreme court registrar, was found dead in bushland in Perth’s Kings park, having disappeared eight days earlier after attending a dancing class in Bentley.

Police charged Rayney with murder in December 2010 and he was acquitted in a judge-alone trial on 1 November 2012.

On Friday, he was awarded $600,000 in the supreme court for damage to his personal and business reputation and hurt and distress.

However, the larger payout will be damages for economic loss, including the adverse affect on his lucrative legal career since Lee named him as a murder suspect.

The Legal Practice Board tried unsuccessfully to cancel his right to practise.

Justice Chaney found Rayney was only entitled to damages for economic loss for three years from the date of the defamation in 2007 until the murder charge in 2010, ruling out a payout for permanent damages to reputation and future earnings.

The amount will be calculated before next Wednesday and will be less than the $10m he claimed, but could be more than the $5m that the state estimated his losses were.

That would eclipse the recent record $4.5m compensation payout to actor Rebel Wilson over defamatory magazine articles published by Bauer Media.

Rayney, who was not in court for the judgment, declined to comment when he left another Perth court where he was representing a client.

His lawyer Martin Bennett spoke outside court alongside Rayney’s daughter Sarah, and said the judgment was a great relief.

“Of course there is emotion. He is an intensely private man. It was something that has had a prodigious effect on Mr Rayney for the last 10 years,” he told reporters.

Bennett said the judgment was a negative one about the conduct of police, both in their investigation of the murder and Lee’s press conference.

Two violent criminals with a history of sex offences were named as suspects, one of whose DNA matched that on a cigarette butt outside the Rayney’s home, but were never charged.

“(As the judgment states) there is a significant portion of this community who still believes Mr Rayney murdered his wife,” Bennett said.

That was why an “enormous amount in damages ... much more than has been awarded in this state” was needed to vindicate his reputation, he said.

The fact that the economic damages would only apply for three years was disappointing, he said.