Start Working With Us

 

We understand that working with lawyers for the first time could be a little different to your usual work. So we have put together a brief overview of our onboarding process to help demystify the process. 

STEP 1

Contact Us

If you are interested in working with us, please Contact Us. We will ask you for some basic information:

  • your name

  • your contact details

  • your address or the address of the land you are concerned about

  • an overview of the advice you are seeking or your issue

  • names of any other parties involved or impacted, for example, local councils

We will perform a conflict check and consider whether we could assist you.

Guthrie Legal advises corporations and government clients. Through our pro bono program we may offer advice to incorporated non-governmental organisations or clients with environmental concerns.

If we cannot advise we will let you know.

STEP 2

Schedule Complimentary Initial Consultation

We will contact you to schedule a free 15 or 30 minute initial consultation by telephone or Zoom.

STEP 3

Talk To Us

The purpose of the consultation is for us to understand more about your issue and assess whether or not we have the skills, experience and time to help you. Please do not send documents or provide a lot of information before this consultation. We don’t provide legal advice in the consultation. 

STEP 5

Engagement Letter

If you are happy with the fee estimate and scope proposal, we will send an engagement letter for you to sign and return to us.

This will start our lawyer – client relationship and we’ll get to work!

STEP 4

Fee & Scope Proposal

If we think we can help you, we will prepare a fee estimate and scope proposal with our recommended next steps. We will make some assumptions about the work. Based on our discussion we will suggest either a fixed fee or hourly rate for our legal fees. We may propose work in stages or offer you a range of options.

If you are comparing legal services providers, always make sure that you are comparing “apples with apples”. We want to make sure that you have clarity and confidence over the expected fees and we spend time to make sure that our estimate meets your needs. We don’t “low ball” our fee estimates as this distorts the true price that a client may end up paying overall.

Guthrie Legal established in 2016 to help clients get the legal support they need in the way that best suits them.

Modern environmental law is about offering the flexibility of legal services to meet your needs as well as being approachable and easy for our clients to work with. We can support clients in different ways, depending on the situation.

  1. Advice on one-off projects or transactions or specific advice

  2. Longer term engagements for ongoing or monthly legal support akin to a fractional in-house environmental lawyer

  3. Larger project support for transform national compliance & governance projects or long-running major projects.

As well as supporting client operational and legal teams directly as an external legal services provider, Gabrielle Guthrie offers consulting support to premier national and international law firms on environment, planning and climate matters.

Contact us to enquire about how we can support you

For more information about our service areas, please visit our Expertise & Services page.

Superhero Clients

We love supporting our clients. You are the superheros that make things happen.

Our role is to be your sidekick, to support you to achieve your goals.

Our client instructors are typically c-suite or director-level personnel, GCs or managers with environmental, risk or operations management responsibility. You might manage a state or regional portfolio, a national entity or a complex project. Frequently you are the visionary, setting direction, or the day-to-day crisis manager putting out “fires”.

If you are stressed out, time-poor and overwhelmed by the legal and risk issues you are managing, we are here to help you.