Legal Advice

We have two levels of legal advice, based on how long we it will take to give you useful advice. The levels are:

• Standard advice – this covers many situations.
• Extended advice – in some cases,  the fact situation is more complex so that we have to take more extensive instructions from you or review a significant number of documents. Advice can also take longer if  the law that applies to your situation is more complex or uncertain,  and if there are a lot of potential options about how to proceed and we need to provide you with advice about the pros and cons of each of them.  We usually recommend extended advice for family law issues, for longstanding problems, for business problems and for any problems where there are a lot of documents to review.

We can also offer you initial advice with an accredited family law specialist, if you have a family law problem and would like to talk to a specialist first.

When making your booking we will let you know the level of advice we think your problem needs.  If you want to book for an advice that is less than we think you need, then we will discuss this with you.  If we think we cannot meet our professional obligation to you, we may refuse your booking.  If we think we can help with some aspects of your problem within the booking type you want, we will let you know how much you can expect from that advice.

We encourage you to provide us with relevant information and documents before your appointment, as this means we are able to offer a more comprehensive service that provides greater value to you. When you talk to our lawyer for advice, we will:

• Take detailed instructions from you about your situation
• Advise you about how the law applies to your situation and the options available to deal with your problem
• Help you to analyse the various options so you can make a decision how best to proceed.  When going over your options we will give you our advice about the outcome you can expect from each option, how much each is likely to cost, and how long each is likely to take.

We will also give you our advice about whether you should handle the problem yourself, and we will let you know about any free services or self-help resources that might be able to help you to do that.  We will let you know if your case is one where our Legal Task Help or Legal Representation service is available, and if you are interested we will tell you how much that will cost and arrange that service for you.

If you want legal representation services that are outside the scope of what Affording Justice does , we can offer you services through our associated practices Shearer Doyle Law  or Doyle Family Law, but we also refer to other lawyers who we would be confident to use for our own matters.

If you are likely to be eligible for free legal services we will refer you to those services.

After Legal Advice you will know exactly what you need to do next to progress your problem.