Pro bono partner spotlight | Fitzroy Legal Service – The impact of secondments

Fitzroy Legal Service (FLS) has been a pro bono partner of Gadens for several years. FLS is Victoria’s longest-serving community legal centre and is dedicated to assisting the most marginalised members of the community with legal information, advice and representation, as well as championing law reform and conducting public interest litigation. FLS provides numerous multidisciplinary and outreach programs reaching communities of colour, people at risk of or experiencing homelessness, victim-survivors of family violence, LGBTIQA+ communities and people who use drugs. Some of the programs and services include the Drug Outreach Program, Q+Law, Family Violence Health Justice Partnerships, the Prison Law Service as well as the iconic Night Service and Law Handbook.

Gadens has worked alongside FLS on a range of projects, as well as accepting referral matters for individual clients. More recently, we have commenced a monthly legal clinic aimed at assisting clients of FLS with citizenship applications and offshore humanitarian visas. Our graduates attend, alongside members of our Sustainability and Social Impact team, to meet with clients and assist with the completion of relevant forms.

Gadens is proud that for the last eighteen months, we were able to have a full-time secondee at FLS, assisting numerous clients across several legal team secondments, which are a vital way of providing much needed resources to community legal centres, and enabling them to assist those most at need within the community.

Reflecting on her secondment, our secondee had the following to say:

“I was seconded to Fitzroy Legal Service from October 2023 to June 2025. During that time, I worked as a lawyer within Q+Law, FLS’s LGBTIQA+ service, a lawyer in their generalist team, and as an acting managing lawyer. I was able to use my existing skill set as an employment and discrimination lawyer, while also learning new areas of law, including tenancy, infringements and intervention orders. I established a drop-in advice clinic at a local service for people experiencing homelessness, as well as a clinic for residents of a local public housing tower. In the acting manager role, I had the opportunity to manage a small team of lawyers and contribute to team and FLS strategy and management decisions.

“During my time I witnessed the excellent work that community legal centre (CLC) lawyers do every day, assisting clients with entrenched inequality and disadvantage to tackle very complex legal problems. I was able to contribute to that work myself and see the immediate and significant impact it had for my clients, in a way that many of us in corporate firms don’t often get to experience. I saw how much CLCs achieve with too little, and I saw the outsized impact that an additional resource such as myself made to the number of clients Fitzroy Legal Service was able to assist.”

FLS’s Chief Executive Officer, Hamish McLachlan said:

“FLS is deeply grateful for our partnership with Gadens. The expertise, commitment and care shown by the pro bono team, and all over staff involved in our partnership have directly improved the lives of many clients and strengthened our capacity to serve the community. Gadens has always been flexible and willing to adapt to the changing needs of our communities and service. The recent full-time secondment was incredibly generous and made an invaluable contribution to our service, in particular by assisting us to establish Q+Law and enabling us to expand our civil legal services in the City of Yarra. It’s a model of how the corporate and community legal sectors can come together to serve our communities.”

Take a look at our collective social impact for FY25 by clicking here.

Quarterly Impact Report – July 2025

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• Pro bono partner spotlight | National Justice Project | Gadens

Authored by:
Cassandra Krylov, Head of Sustainable Business
+61 3 9612 8236
cassandra.krylov@gadens.com