Stacks/Goudkamp’s managing director, Tom Goudkamp, said decades of declining rural services had left people in regional areas without adequate legal assistance. The merger would allow Stacks/Goudkamp to meet some of this “unserviced demand”

Goudkamp, who is president of the Australian Lawyers Alliance, said Long, who won the civil justice award in 1997, had been involved in most of the significant litigation on behalf of farmers in Australia over the past decade. “He has helped with hundreds of smaller group actions and individual claims against State and local government, machinery manufacturers , fuel manufacturers, stock feed manufacturers and others.”

“The merger combines like minded lawyers whose primary aim is to deliver justice to the community and we have more than a dozen litigators to assist the Gunnedah practice,” Goudkamp said.