Organisation : Justice Connect
Location : Melbourne
Work type : Full-time
Sector : Law, Justice & Human Rights
Salary type : Annual Package
Application closing date : 17 Sep, 2021
About the organisation
An exciting opportunity has arisen to join one of Australia’s most successful public interest and social justice organisations. In the face of rising levels of unmet legal need, Justice Connect designs and delivers high impact interventions to increase access to legal support and progress social justice.
We are committed to taking an impact-focused approach, applying research and design principles to develop our products and services to ensure they make a tangible difference for our clients and sector peers.
We deliver services that assist both people and community organisations. Those we assist often struggle to navigate the law, are unable to use the law in their daily lives and experience the impacts of harsh and unjust laws. We aim to prevent and to solve legal problems so that we can prevent the negative impacts on people’s lives and organisations and empower the community to use the law as a force for good.
Given the scale of the challenges we address, we use digital innovation to extend our reach and impact, supporting us to be more efficient and accessible, while helping us capture and use data to better understand legal need and underlying systemic issues.
We harness the extraordinary pro bono contributions of over 50 member firms and the barristers we work with across the country. We channel pro bono effort through our innovative service models to ensure that pro bono hours deliver real impact for the community.
We develop strategic interventions to help address the system-level drivers of legal problems and barriers people face when engaging with the legal system. By addressing root causes of flawed or unfair laws and poorly designed systems, we prevent the long-term challenges that people and organisations continue to face.
Our creative and passionate staff drive us forward with a commitment to evaluation and iteration that ensures our impact increases year on year.
About the role
About Access Program:
This newly created team works to increase access to legal support and progress social justice. It achieves this through three key focuses: providing legal support at scale through digital strategies, rapid responses to community need including disaster response work, and focused work on priority areas of financial and employment law problems.
The team uses a range of approaches including specialist advice, pro bono referrals and online resources. We leverage innovative technology and our network of over 10,000 pro bono lawyers that assist in delivering our legal services. We help across a wide range of areas of law and at all stages of legal issues. We have particular expertise in dealing with issues that have escalated to court proceedings with a long history of running court-based services across a range of jurisdictions.
By identifying and responding quickly to emerging legal trends and using a multi-intensity, multi-channel approach, we strategically tackle legal need in the community. In all our work, we centre client experience and our aspiration to maximise the impact of our interventions.
Role purpose:
The Senior Lawyer or Lawyer role is focused on delivery of our strategy to provide one-to-one and one-to-many assistance through our multi-channel and multi-intensity approach to service delivery. The role:
- leads service delivery to self-represented litigants facing financial hardship in the Supreme and Country Courts of Victoria. Following an evaluation of our service, the role will assist with the delivery of service model improvements and stakeholder engagement to implement evaluation recommendations; and
- contributes to service delivery and legal practice supervision of services to vulnerable and disadvantaged domestic building
Key responsibilities:
Lawyer and Senior Lawyer
- Provide and supervise legal advice and support the operational requirements of Victorian self-representation services and assistance to vulnerable and disadvantaged domestic building consumers, including:
– Supervision and support to paralegals to undertake intake and triage assessment of help seeker requests for assistance.
– Where necessary, considering requests for assistance and making decisions about the nature of assistance to be provided (where escalated).
– Identifying pro bono opportunities and referring appropriate matters to pro bono firms and/or barristers.
– Identifying and where necessary, researching the legal issues involved in help seeker enquiries, settling briefs or referral materials to go to pro bono lawyers, and providing direct legal advice to clients.
– Supporting and supervising PLT students and pro bono lawyers in their delivery of assistance to help-seekers and clients of the team.
– Assisting the Managers to develop and conduct training for volunteer lawyers.
– Escalating risk and legal practice management issues to the Principal Lawyer or Manager.
- Develop and maintain legal resources and self-help tools for help-seekers.
- Build and maintain strong external stakeholder relationships, including with the courts, key referrers, and our pro bono partners.
- Manage a team of paralegals.
- Provide mentoring and support to PLT students and lawyer roles in Access Program including providing support with induction, training, and casework queries.
- Working with the Manager – Innovation, Senior Lawyer – Innovation and Lawyer – Products and Online to identify and understand trends in service delivery, and to develop and test new approaches to meeting identified emerging legal need including development of digital and other innovation resources.
- Support the leadership team of Access Program to implement the team and organisational strategy, and recent recommendations of service evaluations. This may involve work to improve how the team identifies and responds to help seekers with multiple issues, the way in which the team collaborates to respond to need, and how it identifies efficiencies and opportunities for impact.
- Participate in relevant networks, roundtables, communities of practice etc.
- Contribute to organisation and program projects, policy and advocacy work.
- Contribute to Justice Connect’s Reconciliation Action Plan activities.
Senior Lawyer – additional responsibilities
- Assist with budget management
- Oversee and develop projects, co-located services, and targeted work with specific help-seeker groups
- Contribute to and as required lead organisational processes, process improvement projects, integration of digital channels to service models, increased cross-organisation consistency and undertake qualify assurance measures.
Selection criteria:
Please view the attached PDF for information regarding the selection criteria.
Employee benefits:
Justice Connect offers employment benefits including salary packaging (making part of your salary tax-free), flexible working arrangements, above award annual leave provisions and opportunities for professional development. Justice Connect is an organisation that strives to show leadership, operate sustainably and demonstrate our effectiveness. You will be rewarded with a workplace culture that is professional, committed, collaborative and creative and where you can make a real difference through your work.
How to apply
Applications not allowed for this job listing.
Please quote in application: Senior Lawyer or Lawyer via Pro Bono Australia.
Sector: #Law_Justice_and_Human_Rights
