Organisation : Justice Connect
Work type : Full-time
Sector : Law, Justice & Human Rights
Salary type : Annual Package
Application closing date : 29 Nov, 2021
About the organisation
About Justice Connect:
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 Access Program:
Justice Connect’s Access Program is a multidisciplinary team of 20 staff with in-house legal, data, project, and design expertise. We collaborate to increase access to legal assistance and progress social justice by responding quickly to community need including in disaster response, prioritising financial and employment law problems, and scaling legal help with digital solutions, including our in-house developed digital platform, Justice Connect Answers (JCA). By identifying and responding quickly to emerging legal trends we strategically tackle legal need in the community. In all our work, we centre client experience and our commitment to maximise the impact of our interventions.
Our legal services use a range of approaches including specialist advice, pro bono referrals and online resources to help people experiencing legal problems. We also operate weekly pro bono clinics for help seekers involved in litigation in Victorian courts, Federal courts and VCAT. As a team, 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 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.
About the role
Our ideal candidate….
You’ll bring to the team experience in the following areas:
- A minimum of five years unsupervised practice (hold a principal practising certificate)1
- Leading legal service delivery including intake, triage and provision of legal assistance2 to vulnerable and disadvantaged members of the community
- Planning, monitoring and evaluating service delivery and associated budgets informed by service research and data analysis
- Managing staff and leading a team, including building the culture and mindset of a team
- Complex stakeholder engagement with key partners in relation to legal services and government and philanthropic funders3
- Policy and strategic work focused on addressing system-level issues and improving the justice sector
Expertise that you may have that would support our team:
- Post admission experience in relevant areas of civil law, including credit and debt, judicial reviews and appeals and/or general contractual and commercial disputes
- Experience in running services and projects to time, within budget4 and with multiple stakeholders
- Leading continuous improvement of a legal service and supporting change in the team
- Skills in working with data, analytics and reporting tools
- Candidates will need to demonstrate commitment to Justice Connect’s vision, strategy and values.
We know our team and our organisation is stronger with a diversity of backgrounds and experience, including lived experience of the issues we work on. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, people of colour, people from culturally and linguistically diverse and refugee backgrounds, people with diverse religious beliefs, gender diverse people, LGBTIQ+ people and people living with a disability are strongly encouraged to apply.
Key outcomes to deliver:
In this role, you’ll work to:
- Lead a strong legal practice to execute the Access Program Strategy priorities of assisting more help seekers, strengthening capabilities in responding to emerging legal issues, and consolidating the program’s focus on employment and financial rights
- Build strong stakeholder relationships to maintain confidence in our legal services, innovative approaches and to underpin service delivery collaboration
- Manage funding for service delivery and identify and pursue new projects and funding opportunities
- Identify and respond to risks and issues impacting stakeholder relationships, service delivery and projects
- Contribute to organisational activities and projects including Justice Connect’s Reconciliation Action Plan activities.
- Embed Justice Connect’s values in the work of the team, and promote staff well-being, diversity and cultural competency.
A week in this role:
If you were here last week, you would have:
- Participated in a meeting with key court stakeholders on Justice Connect’s services for self-represented litigants and sought stakeholder input into service planning for 2022
- Reviewed and signed off legal briefs dealing with complex legal problems prepared by the team for pro bono lawyers delivering assistance via Access Program clinics
- Provided legal service delivery input into the development of a pilot project trialling the provision of earlier legal assistance to help seekers with domestic building disputes
- Met with the Access Program leadership team to review fortnightly service data and staff insights to support decision making on how to further improve our intake and triage processes
- Identified and explored an opportunity for a pro bono firm to collaborate with Justice Connect on a strategic engagement project
- Held weekly catch ups with staff reporting to the role and supported induction of a new lawyer in the team
- Caught up with colleagues for an end of week remote ‘drink’ and chat on Friday afternoon
How to apply
Applications not allowed for this job listing.
Please quote in application: Manager and Principal Lawyer - Service Delivery, Access Program via Pro Bono Australia.
Sector: #Law_Justice_and_Human_Rights
