Health and disability rights

LawRight is the leading facilitator of pro bono services for Queensland’s most vulnerable and disadvantaged people.

Graduates and lawyers in our Brisbane office participate in LawRight’s Community & Health Justice Partnerships, where LawRight staff, pro bono lawyers and health and community workers collaborate to resolve the intersecting legal and social problems faced by people experiencing homelessness. Our team has primarily assisted clients referred through Anglicare Women’s Shelter, Homelessness Services Women and Families service.

We provide ongoing pro bono legal advice to an array of not-for-profit organisations that work to create positive social change in the areas of disability and health, including:  

National Breast Cancer Foundation

Hebert Smith Freehills has a long-standing relationship with the National Breast Cancer Foundation (NBCF), providing pro bono assistance since 2008. NBCF is Australia's leading not-for-profit organisation funding world-class breast cancer research towards their vision of Zero Deaths from breast cancer. HSF teams across Australia have advised NBCF on several pro bono matters. For example, our Corporate Intellectual Property team regularly assists NBCF with their funding and partnership agreements. This work enables NBCF to expand its reach and deliver its important services to more individuals in the community.  

Youngcare

Herbert Smith Freehills is also committed to improving accessibility for people living with disability in Australia. Youngcare is a not-for-profit organisation that designs and builds Specialist Disability Accommodation for high physical support needs. Our real estate team has assisted Youngcare with the acquisition and purchase of several properties for use as Specialist Disability Accommodation.

Social Tech Trust is a UK-based charity that works to realise the potential of technology to create a more equitable future. We advised Social Tech Trust on its investment into Xploro, a health information platform that uses augmented reality, gameplay, and artificial intelligence to deliver health information to young patients, in a way which reduces stress and anxiety, and makes them feel empowered and informed. The investment was made via a revenue-linked investment instrument that we drafted from scratch and involved complicated legal drafting and tax law advice being condensed into a digestible, plain English and “short form” legal document.

Our transaction advice was provided alongside important charity law advice to ensure the legal drafting to align Xploro's social mission and activities with Social Tech Trust's charitable objects and enables the charity to exit a social investment in the event of “mission drift”. We also advised on the ways in which Social Tech Trust should monitor and control the performance of the investee in alignment to the charity's purposes. This matter was important because it was the first of its kind for STT, and from a charity law standpoint, provided STT with the legal basis on which to confidently assess and execute “programme-related” and “mixed motive” investments in the future.

The Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) is a UK charity offering information, support and advice to almost two million people in the UK with sight loss. We have provided pro bono advice to RNIB for several years, including in relation to two key projects in support of the blind and partially sighted (BPS) community.

We provided contract law assistance to RNIB on the creation of an online engagement platform for the BPS community. This platform will help RNIB to target its research to specific areas which are barriers to inclusion the BPS community currently suffers and, in doing so, help to define the key products and services RNIB need to provide to remove them. The engagement platform will also help RNIB as it becomes more digitally focused across all of its operations. The engagement platform is part of RNIB’s strategic offering and will help define how it serves its customers in the future.

We have also helped RNIB to finalise a collaboration agreement relating to the support offered to BPS individuals via the Eye Care Liaison Officer (ECLO) service. ECLOs act as a bridge between health and social services and are central to the support and wellbeing of patients in eye clinics, supporting people at the point of diagnosis and providing dedicated individual information and advice on how to lessen the impact that an eye condition may have on their life. ECLOs are an integral part of RNIB’s Sight Loss Advice Service and are embedded in most NHS eye departments. RNIB has developed, and maintains, the ECLO Quality Framework and Practice Guidance Standards, and RNIB has plans to promote the roll out the framework to non-RNIB providers of ECLO services so that a common and agreed set of standards become the norm across the UK. Our work will help to develop this common standard of ECLO support across the national landscape.