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Legal Information and not Legal Advice
The content in this Online Training is legal information. It is not specific legal advice. You will learn more about the important difference between legal information and legal advice in Lesson 2 of this Course.
Legal information is general information about the law. It is made freely available to the public by many organisations and government services. Legal information is not specific to any particular person’s life circumstances and it only provides a person with general information on which they can make their own choices.
Legal advice is specific advice to a particular person about how the law applies to their exact life circumstances, and what their options are to enforce their legal rights. It is only given in the context of a confidential relationship between a lawyer or legal service and their client.
As a community worker who is not legally qualified, you cannot give specific advice to a client about how the law applies to their life and what their options are.
In other words, the legal information and case studies provided in this training cannot be applied specifically to a particular client to give them specific advice about what they should do in their life circumstances. As a general rule, if you are unsure whether what you are about to say is legal information or legal advice, it is better to refer your client to a legal service or lawyer. Fortunately, as you will discover in this training, there are many free legal services in the Barwon Region that can provide this specific legal advice to your client.
Case Studies and Real Life Examples
This Online Training uses case studies and real life examples to help you understand the concepts being discussed. Many of these case studies are representations of the work Barwon Community Legal Service has done with our clients. However, in all case studies, important details have been changed so the identity of our clients is protected. Due to this de-identification, any remaining similarity of a case study with a real individual is coincidental. The case studies are only illustrations of the work that Barwon Community Legal Service does.
It is also important that you recognise that every person’s circumstances are different, and that a case study of a successful legal outcome for one client may not mean the same legal outcome for a client you work with in a similar situation. We recommend you refer to a legal service to assist your client and do not rely on any case studies or examples given in this training as legal advice.
