Powered by
MOMENTUM
MEDIA
The Australian Lawyers Alliance’s new president has big plans for the next 12 months, including continuing its crucial advocacy on small business insurance, promoting information sharing across the country, and setting the 30-year-old organisation up for future success.
Michel Margalit, managing principal of Margalit Injury Lawyers, is the latest in a long line of prominent legal figures to serve as national president of the Australian Lawyers Alliance (ALA), including immediate past president Ian Murray, Noor Blumer AM, Tom Goudkamp OAM, Greg Barns SC, Andrew Stone SC, and Peter Semmler KC.
Speaking to Lawyers Weekly about the new role, Margalit said: “The Australian Lawyers Alliance is such a key and important organisation in protecting the rights of ordinary Australians, and it’s a responsibility that I don’t take lightly. I’m very excited for all the work that is before me.”
Admitted in 2011, Margalit spent the next few years with plaintiff firms Arnold, Thomas and Becker and Shine Lawyers, where she “certainly learnt different and important skills in protecting the rights of the injured”. Before long, she had a choice to make: join the Bar or open her own firm.
Margalit Injury Lawyers was born because of Margalit’s passion for collaboration, working closely with colleagues, mentoring junior lawyers, and instilling in her team “what it is to be a plaintiff injury lawyer”.
“At our firm, it’s so much more than a job. We truly embrace the concept that it is a profession, and we look at protecting and representing injured people in a holistic sense. It’s about the help they truly need and how to be heard as an individual,” Margalit said.
“What makes a good plaintiff lawyer is the intense focus on the interests of the individual and strongly advocating for what they need and what is in their best interests. What we see in society are power imbalances – whether it’s employment or an individual going up against a major corporation – and we as plaintiff lawyers need to step in and strongly advocate without fear on behalf of injured persons.”
Not long after its establishment, the firm commenced a major class action against Monash IVF over the destruction of embryos due to an allegedly inaccurate genetic screening program. The class action settled without admission in late 2024 for $56 million.
Having gone through IVF herself for her first and second child around this time, Margalit said she strongly felt there “needed to be focus and attention and reform within the IVF industry globally”.
“It was a very unique time in my life of nursing a baby, and similarly trying to protect people who struggled in creating their own families.
“My ambition is to leave things better than I initially encountered them. Whether it’s IVF or a job or my role in the Australian Lawyers Alliance, I think that when you come out the other side, what I aim to achieve and take pride in is trying to leave it better than I initially found it,” she said.
Looking ahead, Margalit will use her position at the top of the peak professional body for plaintiff lawyers to continue its advocacy before a parliamentary inquiry into small business insurance. The ALA’s position is that further civil liability legislative reform will have “drastic and severe foreseen and unforeseen consequences”.
“It would be pleasing to come out the other side of my presidency having successfully defended the common law rights of ordinary Australians through the parliamentary inquiry,” Margalit said.
The Insurance Council of Australia and other insurers nationally have launched a “full-blown assault on common law rights”, Margalit said, with a drive to minimise the claims that can be brought.
“I think there has been an overblown conflation that Australia has become more litigious than America. This simply isn’t the case. We have a well-rounded and, for the most part, functional compensation schemes across Australia that doesn’t need to be disrupted.
“For most injured people, the last thing they want is to be caught up in the compensation scheme, the last thing they want is to engage a lawyer or have to litigate. It’s usually a last resort when somebody realises they’re not getting better and they simply can’t meet their everyday needs and the ability to pay their bills.
“I think that’s one important element that the legislator needs to understand,” Margalit told Lawyers Weekly.
Margalit also hopes to advocate for legislative change to prevent religious organisations from moving assets as a way to “obviate paying compensation to persons who were abused under their care”.
She also hopes to continue information sharing across states and nationally, “because information sharing is key to strategically protecting the rights of ordinary Australians”.
“As the ALA has grown over the past 30 years, this method for information sharing has become more sophisticated, and that’s something I certainly wish to build upon in my time as president,” Margalit said.
Further, Margalit said she would work with the national counsel, “and the most impressive” general manager Karyn Lemon, to continue to strengthen the ALA’s corporate governance structures “so that, for many years ahead, we have a well-functioning organisation”.
