Global efforts to help ‘legal deserts’ bloom
PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE | 23 SEPTEMBER 2024
As I turn into the home stretch of my Presidency, I find myself reflecting on the issues I’ve been able to champion on behalf of you, the members of the Law Society of NSW.
I’m thrilled some of that activity has now had an international impact.
You may recall that in June our Chief Executive Officer and I, accompanied by Far North Coast Regional Law Society Deputy President Kelly Waring, visited practitioners in Lismore to see how they were recovering from the devastating floods of 2022.
In April, accompanied by key Law Society staff and Councillors, I co-hosted with Far West Regional Law Society President Steven Wright, a roundtable of the local profession and judiciary on the acute access to justice issues experienced in the region.
Noticing our work on this issue, organisers of the International Bar Association’s (IBA) 2024 Conference in Mexico City invited me to participate in a panel on ‘Legal Deserts’. My counterpart from the Law Society of England and Wales Richard Atkinson, along with the First Vice President of the Law Society of British Columbia Brook Greenberg KC, joined me on the panel. The panel was moderated by Ellen Rosen from the IBA’s Bar Issues Regulation Committee.
In April, accompanied by key Law Society staff and Councillors, I co-hosted with Far West Regional Law Society President Steven Wright, a roundtable of the local profession and judiciary on the acute access to justice issues experienced in the region.
Noticing our work on this issue, organisers of the International Bar Association’s (IBA) 2024 Conference in Mexico City invited me to participate in a panel on ‘Legal Deserts’. My counterpart from the Law Society of England and Wales Richard Atkinson, along with the First Vice President of the Law Society of British Columbia Brook Greenberg KC, joined me on the panel. The panel was moderated by Ellen Rosen from the IBA’s Bar Issues Regulation Committee.
We discussed the “increasingly common problem of a lack of lawyers and legal services within our countries”.
Broken Hill’s status as a legal desert is largely due to its geographical isolation in the midst of a literal desert, and the decline of the town’s mining industry. Around 15 solicitors service an area significantly larger than the size of Greece.
Lismore serves as another example of an area suffering from a shortage of lawyers. At the time of our visit, there were 14.1 per cent fewer solicitors in private practice in that community than there were on 28 February 2022, the day of the first flood event that year.
During that visit we were able to attract local and national media attention to the access to justice issues resulting from the floods, and possible solutions. They include the Law Council of Australia’s proposal to attract lawyers to areas of legal need through higher education debt relief.
The critical role lawyers fill in helping people and communities recover from disaster will only intensify, should government forecasts about more extreme climate-related events be realised. As these events are likely to impact rural, regional and remote areas disproportionately, the debt relief proposal deserves fresh consideration from the Commonwealth Government.
As the Conference audience heard, legal deserts can come in many forms, something our members in the legal assistance sector know well. It’s my honour to be taking every opportunity available to advocate for improved access to justice, whether that be on a conference stage or directly with decision makers who wield the levers of policy and hold the purse strings.
Brett McGrath, President, Law Society of NSW
