Carolyn Devries Launched Australia’s First Non Profit Law Firm, New Way Lawyers

Carolyn Devries is a family law specialist who supports individuals who are experiencing  domestic violence, separation, or divorce. She launched Australia’s first not-for-profit law firm New Way Lawyers 12 years ago, effectively creating a thirdmodel of service delivery and offering an alternative approach to family law. 

In 2021 Carolyn launched a Facebook group Lunch with a Lawyer where people can ask questions about family law and domestic/family violence to a qualified family lawyer for free. 

We recently chatted with Carolyn about how she came to establish New Way Lawyers and the amazing work her and her team are doing. 

Can you share with us what your career path was like before you started New Way Lawyers? 

I finished law school as a pretty idealistic law student and I wanted to change the world and make a difference, a familiar thing to most law students. After I’d finished law school, I started working in family law, and was really lucky to be able to experience a few different roles including in private practice and in legal aid. 

The experience of working in different legal service delivery models made me I realise there was a big gap  of  people who weren’t eligible for government funded legal services, like legal aid and community legal clinics, but who couldn’t afford a private lawyer.

I thought I either needed to try to change the system and come up with a better way to do it, or alternatively go and find something else to do. For a little while I did actually go and find something else to do, thinking that it wasn’t possible to bring about much change. I started to work in the nonprofit sector and at the same time started my masters in the management of nonprofit organisations. Through that process and having worked in family law, I started to meld this concept of a nonprofit law firm to see whether itwas possible and then I focused on bringing that to life.

New Way Lawyers is the first non profit law firm in Australia.

What that essentially means is that we are the middle ground or the third model of service delivery to  government funded services or private law firms. 

We aren’t government funded, we are fee for service, but there’s no directors or shareholders in our organisation actually running it to make a profit. The purpose of the fees is simply to cover operating costs, not to not to generate profit. This means our fees are generally about a third less than a normal law firm as a result. 

It’s about providing a more accessible service, but beyond that, it’s also about the message that the model sends to families going through separation and divorce and the community. Family law is really different to buying a house or buying a business or other areas of law. Most of the time the people involved in these areas are doing so with the intention of  making  money, and it is it fine for lawyers to also make money out of that process. But, you know, our families are pretty special and when they go through these really emotional situations like separation and divorce or domestic violence, I just don’t know how lawyers see that as a commodity and a way to make money. It really has to be about community service and care. 

So the model at its heart is about providing accessible services, but more than that, actually the structure allows us to focus purely on the client’s needs rather than generating profit.

What was the response like from the legal profession when you launched New Way Lawyers? 

There were people who recognised the need for what we were doing and were very supportive. At the same time, there are other people that were very confronted and challenged by it. One lawyer told me it was a dirty filthy concept and I was undercutting the profession. 

And, you know, my response to that was always, it’s fine. You know, lawyers can make money off those other things, but not families. Especially when they are potentially going through the worst experience that they’re ever going to go through.

What challenges did you face starting New Way Lawyers from a business perspective?

When you have a dream  the vision of that will just hold you and keep the momentum going. It’s only when you actually get to the point of no going back, that you realise what have I done? There’s no safety net, no backup plan. 

That moment came for me when I decided to quit my job. I’d gotten to a point of being quite comfortable in my career and at a level where I had a lot of experience and I could have, gotten a job anywhere. But I quit my comfortable job and decided to start a law firm and I signed a lease for 167 square metres of office space, which in hindsight, was a very big deal given I had no clients and  no experience running a law firm.

I guess the challenges were probably similar to what a lot of people would share when they first start a business. It’s just a lot of grunt work, early mornings and late nightsin the first instance. Until you can start to build a team around you, you do everything. 

I’d go to the main office to be the lawyer when I needed to be the lawyer and then I’d go out the back when I needed to do the accounts and bank reconciliations. I think the hardest challenge is actually in those early days, you feel pulled in various directions and have to do everything. 

No one tells you how exhausting and hard and all consuming it is, yet at the same time, I don’t think anyone tells you how rewarding it is as well.

Carolyn, you have started a Facebook group called Lunch with a Lawyer, how did that come about? 

I guess it continued to flow out of our core of just wanting to help people in these really difficult situations. When COVID started around March 2020 and things started to really escalate with the pandemic, we saw what I would describe as a perfect storm in family law situations. There was an increase in demand for services. 

Lockdowns were causing greater situations of domestic violence and stress and tension in families. So, families that were already vulnerable had more stress put on them. At the same time, there was a retraction in the ability of service providers to meet those needs, in particular government funded services. We saw community legal clinics close their face to face advice sessions and move to phone session , but there wasn’t necessarily the greatest communication and transition into contactless service.

So, a lot of people were just not able to get access to services. In the courts themselves, the duty lawyer services stopped being face to face and went to phone, but no one knew how to find these services. We saw this perfect storm of so many people missing out, and we identified an opportunity for Facebook being an unused platform for delivering support, as it’s something that people have readily available on their phone.

We like to say it’s a little bit like a virtual or online community legal centre, where people can ask their questions in a variety of ways, either publicly to the group so that the whole group gets the benefit of that information being answered by the lawyer or alternatively privately, if they wish to remain anonymous. The group’s grown enormously and we have over 3500 members. 

What are your plans for the future of New Way Lawyers? 

We have plans of expanding nationally. There’s a concept that a lot of people probably haven’t heard called social franchising. We have focused on getting our model right and knowing exactly what a branch office looks like. We currently have four branch offices and a corporate office and our branch offices really have a beautiful community feel. Every client that comes in is known by name and they know the whole team by name. It’s very personal, very intimate.