Inside the legacy of Legal Aid NSW’s civil law chief

As the largest publicly funded civil law practice in the country, Osborne and her team have assisted clients across a wide range of legal needs, including housing, financial hardship, healthcare, disability supports, discrimination, education, immigration, and workplace disputes.

Between 2024 and 2025 alone, the civil law division provided 56,374 services, which represented a 15 per cent jump from the prior year. At a snapshot over the last year, housing advice increased 17.5 per cent, there was a 68 per cent increase in calls to the Disaster Response Legal Service, and a 54 per cent increase in mental health NCAT grants.

“Our key challenge is meeting the growing demand for civil legal help.

“In the context of the cost of living crisis, the housing crisis, climate change, the increasing frequency and severity of disasters, the aging population, and with more than a million people in NSW living in poverty, we really have to target our help to the people who need us most, and work on matters that are likely to have the greatest impact,” Osborne told Lawyers Weekly in the weeks before her retirement.

One of Osborne’s greatest initiatives to meet demand was the Work and Development Order (WDO) scheme, developed as a pilot in 2011 with the Department of Communities and Justice and Revenue NSW. In the years since, it cleared $500 million in debt and won a Premier’s Award.

A first-of-its-kind program in the world, the WDO has also inspired other states across Australia to roll out similar initiatives.

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For people experiencing hardships, WDO was a solution to a fine system that trapped them between paying for fines – for everything from parking offences, off-leash dogs and unregistered vehicles – and feeding their families. If unpaid, the fine could result in enforcement mechanisms, such as suspended licenses or bank account garnishees.

“[There are] quite serious consequences – if somebody loses their license because they haven’t been able to pay a fine and they live in a remote [or] regional community, how do they get the kids to school? How do they get to the doctors? It ends up in a cycle of secondary offending where people are continuing to drive unlicensed or suspended, and it pushed people into the criminal justice system with something that was quite low,” Osborne said.

If eligible, the debts were cleared by doing a range of activities, including volunteer work, educational programs, mental health treatments, drug and alcohol treatment, and mentoring programs. For some clients, it was the first time they were connected with the services.

“It’s been a really compassionate way to address hardship, but in a way where it’s not a free pass. It requires commitment and engagement from the client and support of services, with a really beneficial outcome,” Osborne said.

For one participant, being connected with services through the WDO scheme meant he could access counselling and mental health services while maintaining the driver’s license he needed to afford food for his five children. Osborne said it was an “absolutely life-changing outcome”.

Operating with the support of government and over 3,000 sponsors – ranging from community organisations, health practitioners, and psychologists – the WDO is an example of agencies stepping out of their individual silos to “solve a common problem together”, Osborne said.

“I never thought I would become obsessed with fines law, but I did,” she joked.

“That was an early Legal Aid career experience to me, [it was] incredibly rewarding, and I just loved the innovation of it; I was tackling an entrenched legal problem in a different way.”

During her tenure at Legal Aid NSW, Osborne has assisted with the development of programs like the Civil Law Blueprint, which restructured the practice to focus on those experiencing deep and persistent disadvantage and dislocation from homes and communities.

“We have really honed our practice now to focus on people who [need] that more intensive service from us, and that has been a big change for our practice, and it’s been welcomed by our staff. Even though it has meant our work has become more complex and more intensive, it’s been a very rewarding experience,” Osborne said.

The civil law division also saw the establishment of a number of new services to meet growing demand, including disability support, elder abuse advice, an employment practice, and a disaster legal service. The latter ensures Legal Aid lawyers are embedded in recovery centres within a week of the disaster to provide frontline assistance.

Bookending her career at Legal Aid NSW was the Homeward Sisters project, developed alongside the Department of Communities and Justice and Corrective Services NSW to tackle the myriad of housing issues Aboriginal women experience on their release from custody.

Osborne explained that the issues can include a rental arrears debt, a negative classification, or an inability to get onto a priority housing waitlist, which can have a flow-on effect of disrupting other parts of their lives. For instance, women who have had children removed may be unable to have their families reunited until housing is addressed.

Following an intensive three-month pilot, Legal Aid NSW was able to remove many of those barriers and helped 160 women get on the priority housing register. The Department of Communities and Justice has since agreed to support it as a business-as-usual project.

“That’s an example of what can be achieved in partnership and by thinking outside the box. This was a continuing program, and we were assisting so many individual women with the same issues coming up over and over again, so we took a systems view of it and have been able to come up with a great program,” Osborne said.

“These programs had very committed staff here who have driven and led those initiatives, and I am incredibly proud of them.”

Looking back at her career – which included working in a pub, hospitality and a call centre for the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission – Osborne said she has “really mixed emotions”. On the one hand, Legal Aid NSW has been a highlight of her career, “but I also have some anticipation for the next chapter”.

Osborne encouraged new career lawyers to consider the next decades of their careers as “seasons”, where they will need to swap between prioritising career and personal lives. While career progression is important, other responsibilities should not fall to the wayside.

“Sometimes I see young staff getting anxious that they are not progressing enough, but I always encourage two things.

“I encourage taking risks and trying new things where you can – I really believe that diversity of experience is great professionally, but it’s also nourishing on a personal level and just expands your worldview and mindset. I would always encourage you [to] take a leap of faith,” Osborne said.

“And find your mentors and your peers who will support you. I’ve had some incredible mentors who have just been so wise and have really support[ed] me over many decades, and that’s been really helpful.”

Having learnt it the “hard way”, Osborne also advised lawyers to have a “rich life” outside of law: “For me, that includes having a group of friends and family who do not care what I do, they absolutely do not care, [because] they just see me as Meredith.”