Eastern Community Legal Centre Multidisciplinary Forum

Eastern Community Legal Centre Multidisciplinary Forum Integrated Legal Practice – Impact and Influence Multidisciplinary Practice Forum

Fitzroy North, 21 October 2024 

We’re on Aboriginal land. I acknowledge Wurundjeri people - their ancestors and elders and their ancient and ongoing culture and connection these lands. I acknowledge Aunty Zeta and her welcome to country and her incredible leadership, storytelling and art.  

Congratulations on putting this forum together. Thanks to the Victorian Legal Services Board for supporting this initiative and for supporting so much innovation in the legal sector through the grants program over the years. 

For me, today is a chance to reflect on the changes I saw across my almost 20 year career in community legal centres. 

It’s also a chance to do some scene setting for the excellent speakers who are coming later in the day. 

It was so good to see the Prime Minister recently announce the significant boost in funding by Australian Government and National Cabinet for community legal and other services to address violence against women. Congratulations to all involved who helped to bring about this result. 

Introduction 

I used to be the manager of the Brimbank Melton Community Legal Centre. 

We had an intake system where clients would be booked in by reception for an initial interview and you would get a short description of what the matter was about. 

I had a new volunteer lawyer. She had worked in commercial law and then taken time out to be a parent and she was now keen to volunteer with us during the day to help us out and build her experience back.  

This was gold for a centre located in Melbourne’s outerwest where few lawyers lived and our volunteer program was much smaller than other centres. 

I chose what I thought would be an easy first client matter for her to join me on. The intake form listed the matter as a motor vehicle accident. 

The client arrived and we sat down with him and asked him how we could help. 

He said something like: My daughter has been raped by her ex-boyfriend. I’m going to kill him and then I’m going to drive off the West Gate Bridge. 

I took a deep breath. I started talking to him about these issues and how we and other services might be able to help, all the while thinking quickly about the ethical issues involved. He was highly agitated. 

We then got talking about his request for help. He had indeed had a car crash which had been his fault. He was uninsured and couldn’t afford to pay and was being repeatedly hounded by a debt collection company. This was adding significantly to the stress of everything he was dealing with and he was at the end of his tether. 

His only income was Centrelink and he had few assets. So I got the name of the debt collection agency that was chasing him. I wrote a letter on the spot to them telling them to contact us, not him, and explaining that it was pointless chasing him for any debt as he was judgment proof. I explained all this to the man and told them we would handle it. 

The man left us at the end of the long appointment much calmer and thankful for our help and with referrals to other services.  

That turned out to be the end of the debt issue. 

The volunteer never came back. 

Legal and life issues intersect 

The point of the story is that legal issues and life issues intersect. 

We all know that the research, and our own experience, tells us that;  

• Unresolved legal issues cause health and other social problems for people.  
• And health and other social problems cause legal issues for people. 
• People often don’t identify legal issues as things that they can get legal help to fix. 
• And when they do, it’s often too late or much harder to address the issue. 

If we want to help people we need to help them to identify and deal with legal issues early. 

And we need to see them as people, not just as an isolated legal issue that needs addressing.  

As community lawyers, we need the skills: 

• To build trust and rapport with people who are often in very difficult situations 
• To understand what is going right and wrong in the person’s life 
• To find the pathways – legal and non-legal – to help address what’s going wrong. 

We need to be flexible and find ways through our service or through referrals to address intersecting legal and other issues. 

We need to use the “trust transfer” to make warm referrals and avoid people unnecessarily having to repeat information. 

And we need to navigate different practice standards in different professions, managing sometimes complex rules around conflict of interest. 

None of this is easy.  

But community legal centres have proven themselves to be the experts at this – innovating over a 50 or so year history. 

For those who don’t know, I started my legal career at a big corporate law firm – then called Mallesons Stephen Jaques – now King & Wood Mallesons. I was doing employment and anti-discrimination law for large companies. I also did some pro bono work and a little volunteering with the Arts Law Centre. 

I got my real human rights education when I put my hand up for a community legal centre secondment under a scheme set up by pioneering Attorney-General Rob Hulls. Under the scheme corporate firms would loan lawyers for free to CLCs. Mallesons supported the initiative and I got the chance to participate.  

The scheme coordinator rang me and asked me where I was interested in working. I was living in Kensington at the time and asked to be sent anywhere in Melbourne’s west. They rang me back and said I’d be going to the Brimbank Community Legal Centre working with a longtime community lawyer called Amanda George who did a lot of work with people in prison. 

I paused. What did a corporate employment lawyer like me know about helping people in prison? 

In corporate law, the clients typically all had university degrees. The legal issues we were dealing with felt important, and a fair bit of money turned on them, but they didn’t really affect the lives of the individual clients.  

Time was money and your typical first meeting with a client didn’t take long to get down to the core business of trying to fix the legal issue they had. 

When I started in community legal centres in 2003, I soon learned that the core legal skills were a much smaller part of the overall work.  

Social skills, building trust, and non-legal skills in understanding how to help and what other non-legal services that might be able to assist, were vital. 

This of course was nothing to new the people who founded the community legal centre movement in the 1970’s, with its strong basis in community development. 

CLCs have always been innovators around how to help people who are in trouble, and how to creatively and efficiently find resources to help them. 

West Heidelberg Community Legal Service is one of the earliest examples – co-located with a community health centre. 

Now the examples are everywhere. 

Monash Oakleigh Legal Service – now Monash Law Clinic I think – I remember visiting and seeing teams of students from different disciplines providing integrated legal, social work and financial counselling support to clients, under supervision. 

The Homeless Person’s Legal Clinic part of Justice Connect, with teams of pro bono lawyers working with social and housing workers to provide holistic support to people experiencing homelessness. 

The Brimbank Melton Community Legal Centre where I worked was part of a bigger multi-program community agency – now called CommUnity Plus.  

We had a range of services co-located with us including victims of crime, consumer support, adult English programs and a children’s contact service which provided safe and supervised place for children to spend time with the parent they do not live with, or to safely facilitate the transfer of children from one parent to another in situations where the parents couldn’t manage this themselves. 

The CLC workers did referrals to those programs and they referred to us. 

We also did various outreach services placing our lawyers at locations convenient to clients and to facilitate cross-referrals. 

We developed good relationships with other services in the area like health and financial counselling and sexual assault counselling to make cross-referrals. 

It worked well enough but there was so much potential to do more. 

Researchers like Mary Anne Noone, Liz Curran, Pascoe Pleasance and Nigel Balmer helped to push this work in the right direction. 

When I joined the Federation of Community Legal Centres in 2007 we started properly measuring the extent of this work with our CLC Census – work which I understand the Victoria Law Foundation is now doing. 

We also started better recognising the specialist skills involved in being a good community lawyer – and how they are very different from other forms of lawyering. 

We set up the CLC Law Graduate Program – a structured program where 1-2 law graduates would gain admission and then rotate through 3 CLCs over their first year of legal work – a generalist, a specialist and a rural and regional CLC. 

We developed a list of core competencies that a CLC lawyer needed to demonstrate – and then created a structured training program with Victoria Legal Aid to make sure the new graduates got the skills they needed. 

The national accreditation scheme was another important development. 

It’s been pleasing to see how far the CLC sector has come on this journey. 

Health Justice Partnerships are thriving in Australia and have come so far since the first partnership so many years ago in Boston. Then, a doctor was tired of helping hospitalised kids get healthy only to see them regress when they returned to cold mouldy substandard accommodation. So he employed lawyers to help families to advocate and litigate with landlords to get proper heating and conditions in tenancies. 

I understand Eastern Community Legal Centre now has around 60 staff – and only a quarter of them are lawyers. It’s turning into a community legal sector with few lawyers. This is a good thing. 

If we want to support people who are in trouble to have the best possible healthy, safe, productive and happy lives, we need legal, health, housing, social work and other services that work as seamlessly as possible with each other.  

To get to the root of what’s going wrong and to work with the person in an integrated and ethical way to support them to address it.  

I want to end by talking about two final areas – public inquiries and advocacy for change. 

Integrated legal practice in public inquiries  

On public inquiries, I remember turning up to the first directions hearing of the Bushfire Royal Commission that investigated the devastating Black Saturday fires in Victoria that led to 173 people dying and the loss of over 2000 homes. I saw the government and all the energy and other corporates lined up with their corporate law firms and teams of senior and junior counsel.  

And I saw little in the way of legal support for the thousands of people affected by the fires who had lost loved ones or homes. 

We advocated without success for a dedicated legal service for people affected by the fires. 

Then, when the Royal Commission into Institutional Child Sex Abuse was announced, this time we were successful. 

A colleague Charandev Singh had pointed me to criticisms of a public inquiry in British Columbia into the poor law enforcement responses to missing and murdered women. The inquiry was dogged by controversy and protests. 

A report by the BC Civil Liberties Association and others described the inquiry as an “absolute failure”.  

The report criticised the way the inquiry excluded the voices of people and communities including Aboriginal women, sex workers, women who use drugs, and women living in poverty who were most affected by the violence and the resulting investigations, and who remain at extremely high risk for violence.  

Criticisms included the terms of reference, the lack of legal and other support for affected people and the inflexible way evidence was taken. 

With the Royal Commission into Institutional Child Sex Abuse, we advocated for a multidisciplinary legal service to support people engaging with the Royal Commission. 

The Attorney-General’s Department agreed to fund the service and knowmore was established in 2013 - with lawyers, counselling and social workers and Aboriginal liaison workers. 11 years on it going stronger than ever. 

Subsequent Royal Commissions have built on this experience. 

I was privileged to work for two years as the CEO of the Yoorrook Justice Commission – the first formal truth telling inquiry into historic and ongoing injustice against First Peoples.  

One of the key successes of Yoorrook has been the way it has built legitimacy and trust with the Victorian Aboriginal community. Aunty Zeta’s son Mark played a key role in this. 

Critical to this has been embedding trauma informed principles in its work and deep community engagement across the state. 

Yoorrook has a social and emotional wellbeing support team and a community engagement team who work alongside the in-house lawyers and solicitors assisting to support people engaging with the inquiry. 

Yoorrook has also adopted very flexible ways of receiving evidence – from handwritten mini submissions to yarning circles done on-country to more formal livestreamed public hearings. 

The work isn’t easy. It was the first time it was being done in Australia so we had to trial and learn and innovate.  

We got better and the impact of the inquiry has continued to grow. It is vital work and it’s an example of how multidisciplinary team can achieve good results. 

Advocacy 

I’ll end by talking about multidisciplinary advocacy. 

We know that for CLCs access to justice is about much more than access to lawyers 

It’s not access to justice to receive accurate legal advice that what happened to you is unfair but perfectly legal. 

To ensure the law delivers justice we need to speak up about problems with the law and policies and how to fix them. 

I learned this early on working in community legal centres seeing how the legal system failed to properly protect the rights and interests of people experiencing poverty and disadvantage. 

Too often our laws are shaped by the voices and perspectives of those who hold power in our society. 

Too often our laws harm those who don’t. 

CLCs have a proud history of advocating to change laws and policies that are unjust, and ensuring the voices and perspectives of our clients are heard in policy debates that affect their interests. 

Increasingly, we’re getting better at doing this in ethical, and multidisciplinary ways. 

We want fewer lawyers as spokespeople. 

We want the affected people themselves speaking up – if they are willing and able – working with legal, media and other support. 

And we want to work collaboratively with other professions – health, housing, education, economic and more – to achieve shared policy goals. 

I remember an Australian Progress conference in Canberra of over invited 100 civil society leaders from around the country. 

A “futurist” was a keynote speaker. He entered the packed room which was waiting with anticipation and he asked: “Where are the artists? Are there any artists in here?”  

One or two people at the back cautiously put their hands up. 

He said words something like “You’re the most important people in the room here. Because when everyone else speaks, the people they are talking to feel like they’re being asked to do something. But when the artist does their work, the people seeing it feel like they are being given something.” 

In other words, artists can reach people about social justice issues in ways that legal advocates can’t. 

When it comes to supporting advocacy by our clients, I recommend Rachel Ball’s report, When I Tell My Story I'm in Charge. She helpfully explores the ways lawyers can facilitate ethical and effective storytelling and advocacy by people and communities affected by injustice. 

The incredible advocacy by the family of Tanya Day – that led to the decriminalisation of public drunkenness in Victoria – is a powerful example of legal services supporting advocacy by the people affected by injustice.  

The national Raise the Age campaign is great example of multidisciplinary advocacy. The campaign was established by Aboriginal legal services and the Human Rights Law Centre. Importantly, it has strongly featured advocacy from health and child wellbeing experts and organisations in a powerful collaboration. 

Conclude 

Thank you for the invitation to speak today.  

I’m so proud to have been a part of the CLC sector for close to 20 years and to have seen the evolution of the sector and it’s increasing sophistication and effectiveness.  

Stay true to your values and keep on innovating.