Push for the bush

In 2009, the then president of the WA Law Society, Dudley Stow, described many of the state’s regional courts as “disgraceful”.

The society’s current senior vice-president, Craig Slater, can recall just how “terrible” courtrooms were in country towns like Karratha, Kununurra, Broome, Kalgoorlie and Carnarvon.

“There were some that were essentially freight containers; they were so small that the judge could be in there with lawyers but no public and there’d be one entrance in and one out … they weren’t air-conditioned and it just wasn’t conducive to the kind of expectations of a person in Perth going to court, it wasn’t even close to that,” said Slater, a barrister who has worked at Mallesons Stephen Jacques, Lovells in London, ASIC, Phillips Fox and Blake Dawson.

Since then, funds have since been injected and courts rebuilt. There still remain, however, barriers to adequate legal services for regional communities, due to difficulties in getting lawyers to go bush and stay there.

Regional community legal centres (CLCs), like the Hume Riverina CLC, run on small budgets and funding is never guaranteed. Add to that the ageing profession in RRR areas and it’s no wonder attracting and retaining lawyers in such areas is a nationwide problem.

 “It has implications for the stability of the workforce and particularly people who want to work there but they don’t have long-term employment contracts and they could be laid off as soon as the funding finishes,” says Helen McGowan, who lives on a farm in the Indigo Valley in north-east Victoria, is the national RRR coordinator and is completing her PhD on regional legal practitioners.

“I think there’s a gap between those young lawyers who’d like to stay and then transitioning into practice, like working out how to do it, how to buy in, how to be supporting in that transition.”

Towards a national perspective

The Law Council of Australia (LCA) set the wheels in motion to start this conversation after it received up to $250,000 as part of a $1.1 million funding grant from the Attorney-General’s department in May 2010.

The LCA developed a website that was focused on attracting people to work in regional areas, including providing opportunities for rural and regional practitioners to advertise for free on the website [RRRlaw.com.au].

The website details training to encourage law graduates to work in RRR CLCs for their Professional Legal Training (PLT) work experience and placements. It provides the contact details of McGowan, as well as a regional RRR coordinator in northwest Queensland, western NSW, the Northern Territory and SA.

Currently, there are four jobs listed on the site: one in Darwin and three in Dubbo; less than one might expect, given the shortages in RRR areas.

McGowan says she has seen the full gamut when it comes to older practitioner’s willingness to take on new lawyers.

“On the one hand, I hear practitioners say ‘it’s difficult to do because we don’t have the time to supervise them’ and, on the other hand, we see examples of legal practices, I call them ‘nurseries’ as a working term, where they love to have the young practitioners come in and they train them and they’re very generous with their time and they realise that they might not get the benefit on that lawyer staying …  but they’re stewards of the profession and their committed to legacy lawyering,” says McGowan.

Funding to the RRR project ends in October this year, so the website and its initiatives will have to be self-sustaining thereafter.

The LCA is currently working on a phase two now that involves building on the traction the project has gained and profiling the website to law students.

Short-term vision

It might be taking a while to get going, but the RRR project appears a more sustainable approach to promoting rural work compared with some arrangements that have been made available through funding in SA and WA.

The WA-specific Country Lawyers Program, set up in 2007, pooled funding from a number of different services like Legal Aid, CLCs and the Indigenous Family Violence Prevention Legal Services, in order to fund some graduates to go to the country.

Slater explains that some graduates were able to get government assistance housing, a place in a regional area and then a uniform pay check coordinated by Legal Aid.

“That went for a couple of years; what then happened was the Commonwealth Government said ‘we’re meeting all of the requirements, there aren’t any unmet needs for lawyers’ and its not putting grads out in the rural areas anymore,” says Slater, adding that the Government is now focused on mental health initiatives and promoting the benefits of working regional in the major centres.

“It was an expensive process as I understand and it’s subject to funding and government tends to change funding in terms of priorities and we’re not in control – it didn’t address long-term needs of lawyers in regions or communities in those regions because it was a one-off placement and at end of year they’d come back and work elsewhere.”

While such a project, which is similar to what now runs in SA - where graduates can receive money to help with travel and accommodation to go and work out in the bush for only their PLT placement -was effective in getting people out there, it’s not the most sustainable approach.

 “Public funds is the main place where that money resides and, as far as I can tell, they’re all jurisdictionally based and they don’t have a national conversation, maybe as we move towards a national profession, fingers crossed, a conversation might start about what are our national funding priorities,” says McGowan.

Connecting the bush to NBN

One way of tackling the vast distances and remoteness, which are particularly stark in WA, is through broadband internet.

On August 4, Attorney-General Nicola Roxon announced the first round of successful applicants to share National Broadband Network (NBN) legal assistance partnerships.

"These grants will challenge applicants to identify innovative and collaborative ways of providing legal assistance and sharing knowledge more effectively with regional community legal services," said Roxon.

This $400,000 in funding forms part of the Government's $4 million funding commitment made in the 2011-12 Budget to improve access to legal assistance services through the NBN for people living in regional Australia.

The first round of successful applicants were Northwest CLC (Devonport) Tasmania, Hobart Community Legal Service, Redfern Legal Centre providing services to Armidale in NSW, and Welfare Rights Centre South Australia.

The rollout will mean quicker communications between RRR areas and lawyers anywhere in the state. The Law Society is pressing courts to open up their audio-visual lengths so that practitioners in Perth can represent clients in Broome, says Slater.

“The courts have quite sophisticated audio visual but it’s just the bureaucracy to get it activated. Like, you’ve got a practitioner and client in different locations to the court, it’s possible to link them  up by video connection but its not done very often so were trying to clear away obstacles for that to happen ,” he says.

LIV president Michael Holcroft touts the benefits of video-link conferences, which he says he’s participated in multiple times from his practice in Mildura.

“As technology advances and delay time decreases it will become more and more beneficial. It’s better than phone because you can actually see who is speaking for one thing; you get a bit more body language and it’s just an easier concentration on someone’s face rather than relying solely on audio,” he says.

Benefits of the bush

There’s a campaign running at the moment, Community Law Australia, which purports that for every $1 of public funds invested in the community sector there’s an $18 return on investment because the community sector works in a holistic and preventative way.

The group launched a report entitled Unaffordable and out of reach: The problem of access to the Australian legal system, in the High Court of Australia in early July.

US studies have found that because regional lawyers live and work in their regional communities they have a vested interest in resolving conflict in a timely way and not escalating it.

“There’s a tendency for people to resolve issues quickly and in a way that’s more collaborative and a lot of country lawyers will say they’re ‘collaborative lawyers’,” explains McGowan.

The same might be said in metropolitan centres, but McGowan suggested the proximity, depending on the size of the community, as well as limited access to courts and resources, might make country lawyers more inclined to “just get stuff sorted”.

It is accepted that lawyers in regional areas gain access to a greater variety of work quicker than their city counterparts. RRR practices can also fast-track responsibility and seniority in the firm and offer a better lifestyle and greater work-life balance

Getting these ideas out to city university law careers fairs is something that could be ramped up to increase traction, says McGowan, who is heading to UTS soon to present RRR opportunities as “extreme lawyering” and ”alternative careers”.

 “A lot of grads who have the stomach for it and who are resilient will choose extreme lawyering options like working in remote areas because they want that deep-end experience and they trust that they’ll be able to survive it,” says McGowan.

“Once they’ve done two years in the bush they say ‘you’ve got all that experience, you can work anywhere’ so again that’s part of the script that we say. We have trouble getting that message out so I think this is very much a cultural change so we need to be a bit smarter, a bit more coordinated as a profession – a regional profession - to sell that message,” she says.

Geoff Bowyers is a partner and director of 20-staff Bendigo firm Beck Legal and can’t talk up the benefits of regional practice enough. Less traffic and congestion, cheaper housing and rent, better working hours, greater flexibly, higher quality of work, the list goes on, he says.

He argues there is a misconception among lawyers in the cities that there is a lack of resources in the bush and a lesser quality of work.

“We use facilities like Reuters online, we have access to a range of online periodicals: Butterworths, LexisNexis, the LIV has a fantastic library service, which gives us the same level of access as a Melbourne firm,” he says.

“Approximately 40 per cent of our income comes from metropolitan clients. We act for around 14 local government councils across the state and for two major councils in metropolitan Melbourne … we’re extremely accessible and our overheads are less than Melbourne offices so we’re very competitive in terms of price.”

Bendigo is one of the fastest-growing regional centres in Victoria and is home to a range of major institutions like the Bendigo bank and La Trobe, where Bowyer says the majority of grads come from.

”As a result of an amalgamation of a range of councils, which happened in the 1990s,  the major regional centos like Bendigo, Ballarat and Geelong and Shepparton have developed much more economic clout than they previously had so there’s a lot of development and opportunities going on in those areas ,” says Bowyer.

The same can be said for WA where the mining boom has propped up a number of regional centres.

Slater describes the town as having gone from “a tiny little town in the last 30 years to a fantastic resort development town now close to a lot of potential mining developments” and that has meant more lawyers and firms for the town

It’s partly about supply and demand and there will always be mismatches between the need for services and available resources for services.

McGowan’s PhD calls for empirical data. While there are lots of anecdotes out there, there’s no saying how accurate a picture they paint.

“Back in 2005 the LIV did a study on attitudes to practice and they found a lot of the bush lawyers were saying ‘ohh they come and they won’t stay’, but in fact they were staying for an average of four years, which was much, much better at that time than what was happening in the city,” says McGowan.

“What we haven’t had is that national approach within the profession until just this last finding round, where we’ve now got the RRR law website and the integrated strategy to try and get the word out,” she says, “It’s very early days and its done great stuff about raising awareness but what we need now is to continue to enhance that message.”