Access to justice and housing

Young people facing homelessness are more likely to suffer human rights violations and experience disadvantage in the legal process. In an effort to counter this, The Shopfront Youth Legal Centre was established in 1993 in inner-city Sydney to provide free legal assistance for homeless and disadvantaged young people aged 25 and under. The Shopfront is jointly operated by HSF, Mission Australia, and The Salvation Army.

The Shopfront has a multidisciplinary team, with the permanent legal staff employed by HSF, while a case worker employed by Mission Australia responds to each client’s non-legal needs, such as housing, education, counselling, and employment. HSF also sends two lawyers on a pro bono secondment to The Shopfront each year.

The Shopfront represents and advises young people on a range of legal issues, with a particular emphasis on criminal law. In addition to assisting around 600 individual cases each year, The Shopfront also has a broader impact by:

• Advocating for systemic change that will benefit all young people experiencing homelessness.
• Educating the youth sector and legal profession, and achieving law reform in areas such as fines, traffic law, policing, and the treatment of mental health and cognitive impairments in the criminal justice system.

In 2024, Jane Sanders AM – Principal Solicitor at The Shopfront – was awarded a Member of the Order of Australia in recognition of her 30 years of service to law and youth justice. Jane and the Shopfront team have been recognised with various other awards and accolades over the years, including the NSW Law and Justice Foundation's Pro Bono Partnerships Award and the Justice Medal.

We are committed to using our expertise, resources, and leadership to ensure that equal access to justice is a reality. We support a number of legal clinics for individuals across Australia in partnership with Community Legal Centres:

Keeping women and children safely housed

• In Queensland, our lawyers volunteer at a fortnightly free legal clinic with LawRight’s Community & Health Justice Partnership with Anglicare Homelessness Service Women & Families. This work supports LawRight’s ‘Your Own Home’ program, which assists women and their families, particularly those with an experience of family violence, to avoid homelessness.
• In Victoria, we work closely with Justice Connect’s Women's Homelessness Prevention Project (WHPP), which has helped keep 1,405 women and children safely housed since its establishment in 2014.

Supporting migrants and refugees

• Nationally, HSF lawyers work on legal clinics with both the Refugee Advice and Casework Service and Refugee and Immigration Legal Service to support their work. The current clinics focus on supporting RACS and RAILS clients to reunite with their loved ones under the Family Reunion program, as well as a dedicated clinic to support clients of RACS’s LGBTQI+ Safety Program.

Employment advice for individuals

• In Queensland, HSF lawyers work with the Caxton Legal Centre Employment Law Clinic to provide advice to individual clients and assist with a wide range of employment law issues, including dismissal claims, workplace bullying, discrimination, and sexual harassment.

We also seek to increase access to justice by providing secondee lawyers to community legal centres and other charities. For over 30 years, we have sent lawyers on full-time 6-month pro bono secondments to Kingsford Legal Centre and The Shopfront Youth Legal Centre. We also send lawyers on full-time secondments to Inner Melbourne Legal Centre, Justice Connect, and Mission Australia. In Perth, all of our newly admitted solicitors undertake a 2-week secondment to Sussex St Community Legal Service, and we have also sent secondees to the Employment Law Service at Circle Green Community Legal Centre.

Our APAC lawyers have engaged in strategic litigation across our pro bono focus areas. We have provided pro bono representation in cases that not only increase access to justice for individuals but also have the potential to create systemic change for disadvantaged communities.

We have taken several strategic pro bono matters to the High Court of Australia. For example:

• We provided pro bono support to a community legal centre acting for a client who had made a complaint of discrimination in relation to a building development with a ‘stairs-only’ entrance. The matter raised significant constitutional law issues and shone an important public light on the rights of people with disability to dignified, equitable access.
• We assisted a pro bono client in an appeal to the High Court in relation to the client’s right to apply for a protection visa. In addition to conducting extensive research and drafting work to develop the client’s submissions, our team appeared in the High Court with Counsel also acting pro bono to argue the case.
• We acted pro bono for two transgender men in a case concerning a decision by the Gender Reassignment Board of Western Australia. Multiple parties sought leave to intervene in the proceedings, and the case progressed to the High Court of Australia. The High Court ultimately held that the clients could have their gender legally recognised without having to undergo surgery to alter their reproductive organs.

Examples of other strategic litigation our teams have been involved in include:

• Working with Equality Australia to challenge the framing and omission of questions about gender identity, sexual orientation, and intersex variation in the Australian Census.
• Acting in a discrimination matter involving a private school’s refusal to relax its uniform code to allow a child to wear a Patka (turban) at school. The Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal ruled that the school had violated the Equal Opportunity Act 2010 (Vic), which was the first time the exceptions under the legislation had been considered in the Victorian courts or tribunals.

Herbert Smith Freehills partners with non-profit organisation BABSEACLE on pro bono initiatives across Asia. These initiatives focus on supporting Clinical Legal Education (CLE) programs that serve the legal needs of marginalised communities and, in turn, strengthen the rule of law across the region.

In collaboration with stakeholders, including universities, law students, members of the legal community, and corporate partners, we have worked with BABSEACLE to develop and deliver a wide range of justice education programs across the region.

Some highlights of our work with BABSEACLE include:

• Co-founding the Asia Pro Bono Conference with BABSEACLE. The conference aims to increase the understanding of, and need for, pro bono work across Asia. It has become the main vehicle for collaboration and thought leadership on pro bono in Asia.
• Acting pro bono for BABSEACLE to obtain charitable status.
• Drafting and developing university teaching materials on ethics and professional responsibility, evidence, and mock trial procedures, which have been incorporated into the university curricula across South East Asia.
• Providing seed funding and support for the establishment of legal clinics in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and Vientiane, Laos.
• Presenting training sessions at workshops and BABSEACLE's annual Access to Justice gathering on topics including client-centred lawyering, ethics, professional responsibility, and client communication in Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, and Thailand.
• Preparing a curriculum and acting as trainers and judges for an annual CLE mock trial initially held across Myanmar universities, and now run as a Regional Mock Trial in Chiang Mai, Thailand. This unique event is attended by students and others throughout Asia and aims to provide students with experience in case preparation, advocacy, and court procedure, while simultaneously instilling in them greater understanding and appreciation for fair trial and rule of law principles.
• Developing and delivering a legal ethics training workshop for members of the Laos Bar Association, covering ethical dilemmas, conflicts of interest, and corruption.

HSF team members from our Bangkok, Tokyo, and Melbourne offices with Bruce Lasky, Co-Founder/Director of BABSEACLE, after delivering CLE sessions at the 2024 Access to Justice Exchange in Bangkok.

The Women's Homelessness Prevention Project (WHPP) is a joint project of Justice Connect Homeless Law and Herbert Smith Freehills’ Melbourne office. WHPP’s integrated legal services and social work support model has been recognised by the Law Council of Australia as best practice for successfully preventing and reducing housing insecurity.

Through the clinic, HSF lawyers assist WHPP clients with legal advice and representation on housing and tenancy-related matters under the supervision of Justice Connect. We also provide legal support to assist with other barriers to secure housing, such as resolving debts and fines. This legal help is combined with the support of the WHPP social workers, who assist clients with navigating the court system, and connect them with WHPP partner organisations that provide employment support, financial counselling and housing services.

Over the 2014-2024 decade, the WHPP has:

• helped 1,405 women and children to safely avoid homelessness (83% of whom had experienced family violence);
• directly prevented the eviction of 1,019 women and children; and
• achieved an 87% success rate in sustaining tenancies.

HSF also sends solicitors on secondment to Justice Connect Homeless Law. Secondees assist with casework, as well as law reform and policy work focused on safer housing for women who have experienced family violence.
 

HSF and Justice Connect staff and alumni at an event in our Melbourne office making 10 years of the Women’s Homelessness Prevention Project.

Lawyers from our Brisbane office volunteer at a fortnightly free legal clinic as part of LawRight’s Community & Health Justice Partnerships (CHJP) program with Anglicare Homelessness Service Women & Families.

The Anglicare Women’s Shelter provides crisis, as well as medium-term accommodation for women experiencing homelessness. Many of the women we assist through this clinic have experienced family violence. This clinic is part of LawRight’s ‘Your Own Home’ program, which assists women and their families to avoid homelessness.

We started our first pro bono legal clinic with LawRight (formerly QPILCH) in 2002 and are proud to support their work.

Herbert Smith Freehills runs a weekly housing law clinic in collaboration with Toynbee Hall, providing free legal advice to members of the East London community and beyond.

Based in East London, Toynbee Hall is a charity which works alongside people/communities facing poverty and injustice, to build a fairer and happier East London. Toynbee Hall offers advice services which are centred around the experiences of the people they work with. These services include debt advice, and legal assistance on housing, employment, welfare benefits, consumer rights and more.

In collaboration with Toynbee Hall, Herbert Smith Freehills runs a weekly housing clinic in which our lawyers and trainee solicitors provide free legal advice on a range of housing issues such as social housing provision, evictions, overcrowding and disrepair. 

Herbert Smith Freehills lawyers, in collaboration with the in-house legal team at Goldman Sachs provide free independent and confidential legal advice to young people supported by Centrepoint.

Centrepoint is the UK's leading youth homelessness charity, working directly with some of the most vulnerable, disenfranchised and socially excluded members of society. Every year, Centrepoint, alongside its partners, supports almost 14,000 young people to tackle the issues that led them to become homeless and give them the vital support they need to get a job and a home of their own.

Our lawyers advise remotely via telephone to engage with young people across Centrepoint's UK-wide network on issues ranging from housing, employment, care leaver rights and civil liberties. We undertake follow-up work and support onward referrals where necessary. We also provide resources and training on legal issues to staff supporting Centrepoint's young people.

The Big Issue is one of the UK's leading social businesses and exists to offer homeless people, or individuals at risk of homelessness, the opportunity to earn an income and integrate into society, giving them a "hand up, not a handout". We have advised the Big Issue Group on several important matters over the years, across a variety of its impact areas.

For example, a team of lawyers from across our London charities, corporate, data protection and charities practices advised Big Issue Group on a transformative transaction that unifies all frontline activities within The Big Issue Group for the first time. The transaction – a charity merger and transfer of assets from another charity – created a combined team that, working from a newly formed community interest company that we helped to establish, will extend the reach of Big Issue's services.

Another example, is our work with Big Issue Invest, the impact investment arm of the Big Issue. We have not only advised Big Issue Invest on investment work, such as its investment in ethical lettings agency Homes For Good, but we have also provided Big Issue Invest with data protection advice in connection with its role in the National Lottery's Social Enterprise Support Fund (SESF). SESF was a partnership between leading charities (UnLtd and School for Social Entrepreneurs) and leading social enterprise investors and support agencies (BII and Resonance), which saw the joint delivery of financial support to other charities and social enterprises struggling with inflation and cost-of-living pressures. Through SESF, BII and its partners unlocked substantial government funding that they administered to charities and social enterprises requiring financial assistance. Our role evolved from initially advising BII on the data protection aspects of the arrangements to acting jointly for BII and UnLtd, leading the drafting for the SESF documentation. We helped structure the arrangements in an efficient manner to unlock critical funding without unnecessary administrative burdens.

Founder of the Big Issue, Lord Bird and CEO of Big Issue Group, Paul Cheal speak to HSF employees at an event chaired by London Finance Partner, Joy Amis.