The Profession
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Press
Employment contracts fail in litigation not because of dramatic errors but because of small ambiguities, missing terms, and provisions that were copied from a precedent without being adapted to the specific relationship. Getting the drafting right requires both legal precision and a realistic picture of how employment relationships actually end.
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Press
Most lawyers approach personal branding as an afterthought — something they'll get to once the work slows down. The work never slows down. Meanwhile, the profession is quietly redistributing itself toward the practitioners who understood early that reputation is not the product of good work alone. It is engineered, tended, and published.
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Australian professionals are increasingly assessing employers not only on salary and career opportunities, but on whether organisational values are reflected in leadership behaviour. In an environment shaped by transparency, reputational risk and heightened workplace expectations, workers are paying closer attention to the gap between what organisations say and what their leaders do. For legal and professional employers, authenticity, consistency and credibility have become critical factors in attracting and retaining talent.
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As the Family Law Act continues its slow evolution, the tension between past contributions and future requirements remains a point of friction for practitioners. A clearer distinction between Section 79 and Section 75(2) is not just a technicality, but a necessity for equitable outcomes in the modern era.
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Australian class action practice has been transformed over the past decade by the maturation of the litigation funding market, legislative changes to the regime in Victoria and federally, and a growing willingness by courts to manage large, complex group proceedings with genuine efficiency. The practical implications for defendants, insurers, and their advisers are substantial.
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The traditional "clerk" has been the gatekeeper of the Australian bar for a century. But as self-employed practitioners embrace tools like Lovable and automated practice management, the necessity of the middleman is being questioned.
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The "Right to Disconnect" is a significant shift in Australian industrial relations. The Profession explores the practical implications for mid-market firms and why the cultural change may be more difficult than the legal one.
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The billable hour has long been the standard for the Australian legal profession, but it is increasingly seen as a relic of an inefficient era. Boutique firms are leading the move toward more sophisticated pricing models.
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Wellbeing in the law has become a "performance" rather than a practice. Until we address the structural pressures of the billable hour and the culture of availability, superficial initiatives will continue to fail.
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Press
Mid-market IP practice is neither a scaled-down version of the major firm model nor a boutique specialist's preserve. It occupies a distinctive space with its own demands — managing clients who often know a great deal about their IP and relatively little about the law, advising on risk in real time, and building a practice without the infrastructure of a large team behind you.
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Press
The legal profession's periodic campaigns against the billable hour tend to generate more heat than insight. The real question isn't whether time-based billing is philosophically defensible — it's whether law firms and their clients are having the right conversations about value, risk, and fairness.
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Twenty years of family law practice have taught Louise Miller many things. Among them: that the legal problem is rarely the whole problem, that emotional intelligence is not soft, and that sustainability in this work requires the same intentional architecture that good lawyering does.
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