Episode 02 – From Sophie to Fireflies: The AI Ecosystem Shaping Practice at Spurling Legal

Dicky Abraham (00:09.134): G’day everyone and welcome to another episode of Spurling Insights. My name is Dicky Abraham, Principal Lawyer at Spurling Legal.

And I’m Dania Foo, I’m Dicky’s wife and I’m also a lawyer at Munro Doig Lawyers. Yeah, here we are, episode two.

Dicky Abraham: Welcome, Dania, back for another episode. Before we get into it, let’s get the usual disclaimers out of the way. So everything we say or do in this episode shouldn’t be construed as legal advice. It’s just two lawyers having a yarn about law life and everything in between. Now, with that being said, back for episode two, we’re not a one hit wonder, so to speak.

But before we dive into the episode, would you want to share with everyone what the feedback was like from our first episode?

Dicky Abraham (00:54.274): Yeah, sure. Look, the feedback has been largely positive and I’m pleasantly surprised. As you can attest, I was quite nervous.

Dania Foo: We both were.

Dicky Abraham: That’s right.

But it’s been good. A lot of my colleagues who have seen the episode have got back to me and wanted to know more about how I use AI, specifically what sort of programs I use, how I use it, and what sort of safeguards I’ve implemented so I don’t end up being the leading authority on how not to use AI. So I thought this would be a good opportunity to go through that and explain in detail how AI is embedded into Spurling Legal and the different programs we use and how they work together. What do you think? with that.

Dania Foo (01:38.946): I think that sounds really good. And then obviously you also want to discuss the working from home commentary and dialogue that’s been around. So we’ll have a brief chat about that. Yeah, that may be particularly interesting for our listeners in Victoria. Yeah, I think so, especially because in Victoria there’s a push to try and entrench a right to work from home. At the moment there’s a right to request work from home, but there’s no real right to work from home. So we can have a discussion about that. So shall we get started? Let’s now you’ve got quite a few different AI tools. Which one would you like to start with?

Dicky Abraham (02:11.426): Let’s start with Sophie, my AI receptionist. But before I talk about that, context, I have five different AI programs that I use. There’s Sophie, there’s a legal AI assistant that I use, there’s Fireflies, which is an AI transcription service that I use, and then there’s an AI time tracker as well that I’m looking at. And last but not least, I also have a standalone AI running on my computer, and all of them work together. But… Start with Sophie. As Dania mentioned, Sophie is my AI receptionist. She’s exactly that. She does everything that a receptionist can do. She’s the first point of contact when you ring Spurling Legal. She’s fantastic. She was developed specifically for Spurling Legal, so I got developers to develop her for me. She is able to answer calls, triage calls, or take messages. Basically everything a receptionist can do. She’s fantastic. I was hesitant at first because I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but because she’s been developed specifically for Spurling Legal and the parameters I’ve set, I think she works really well. Did it take a while to get her trained up? Yeah, it was about a month. it took me and our developers about a month to get her to a position where we could deploy her. She’s not that expensive, it’s a subscription-based model, so I’m paying $200 a month for…

Dania Foo (03:36.302): much less than what you’d pay a human to do that job.

Dicky Abraham: Correct. Correct. So she’s quite good in the sense that unlike a human, she’s been designed to try and grab certain details of clients. That’s what I wanted because as a one man operation, often I can’t get to the phone if I’m in court, if I’m with another client conference. So I want her to make sure that she captures certain details so can get back to them. So she’s been designed so that she tries and pushes for those details in a very polite way. Of course, if a client says, I don’t want to provide my phone number or my email, she will immediately say, “That’s fine. We’ll get Dicky to call you back or contact you if you, or would you like to contact Dicky when you get the chance.”

So she’s incredible and she’s continually improving. So each time she gets a call and she answers the phone, she learns from it. and then soon in the next couple of months, she’s gonna, as I understand it, developers are gonna deploy a calendar integration so she will be able to review my calendar and book appointments if there’s a slot available, which I think will be quite handy for myself because at the moment she’s taking messages or she’s directing the call to me and I’m manually booking the slots in the calendar.

Dania Foo: Now I’ve spoken to Sophie a few times and I, look, there is a slight lag in answering questions that normally a human wouldn’t necessarily take that much time to think about that particular question. But besides that, I couldn’t really tell that Sophie was not a human. She speaks like a human would in terms of the cadence of a voice, the language she uses.

Dania Foo (05:15.722): Have you had any feedback from clients or have you had anyone identifying that she’s not a human?

Dicky Abraham: Yeah, look, most of the clients don’t recognize that she’s an AI receptionist. They often, and I’ve got a portal where I can see the conversation. So often I can see how they’re talking and it simply comes to me. The ones that do recognize that she’s an AI assistant, they immediately ask to be put to a human. So then the call comes directly to me and the first question they ask me is whether I’m an AI. So I don’t know whether that means that Sophie’s doing such a great job of impersonating a human or I’m doing a pretty poor job of being a human.

Dania Foo: I won’t make any comments about that point. So that’s Sophie. So shall we move on to the next AI tool?

Dicky Abraham: And this is probably my favorite tool to use. It’s the Legal AI Assistant that I’ve subscribed to. It’s an LLM or a large language model that’s been designed for lawyers in Australia and New Zealand. It’s a fantastic piece of kit because, and the name is quite misleading. Even though it’s named Legal AI Assistant, it’s probably on par in terms of skill level and legal expertise. with a four or five PQE lawyer. So I treat it like a grad. I ask it to draft chronologies, draft letters, and then I settle it. And the quality of work that it produces is incredible. I can’t say enough good things about it. So it’s my favorite tool to use. And it does make a lawyer’s life a lot easier.

Dania Foo (06:51.35): Now when I’ve used more generic AI tools out there, so for example, ChatGPT, I find that the quality of the answers that I get back… really is so dependent on the quality of the prompt that I put in and sometimes, you know, I suppose that’s a failing on my part that, you know, I’m not putting great prompts in or I’m having to spend a lot of time refining those prompts, crafting those prompts and it’s very time consuming. So do you think that given the amount of time that you need to spend on producing these quality prompts to actually produce an answer that you’re looking for, is it worth using the eye tool compared to just doing the task manually?

Dicky Abraham: Absolutely. With the Legal AI Assistant, I dictate to it. And you have to keep in mind that the Legal AI Assistant, it’s a packet of programs. It’s a packet of LLMs. So they have an LLM for discussion purposes. They have an LLM for research purposes. And they all work together. They recently rolled out an LLM for prompts. So they have an LLM where you can dictate what you want. And it will fashion that into a prompt with the appropriate context and detail. And you simply click that, plug that into the discussion model and it generates the response that you were seeking.

So yes, if you were to manually type out the prompts, it might take a bit more time, but I dictate. And that’s where the time saving comes in because you’re dictating and Compass, which is the LLM model that fashions the prompt, that’s what it’s called. It immediately goes through and fashions your colloquial language into a prompt that you can plug into the discussion model, and then it generates the answer.

Dania Foo: And it probably fashions it in a way that the tool itself has been trained to answer. So you’re really getting the best prompt for that tool.

Dicky Abraham: Correct, correct, exactly. And so with COMPASS, it makes lawyer’s life a lot easier, because often, like you correctly observed, getting that context to the AI is very important. And you can use, it’s akin to working with a graduate lawyer as well. You tell a graduate lawyer to draft a summary without giving him or her too much context. You will get a summary.

Now, if you give him context, you will get a better quality summary. It’s the same principle. So providing that context is important, breaking it down into different tasks as opposed to one giant task.

And that’s where the Compasss large language model comes in. It breaks it down to various different tasks. It asks for more detail if it senses that there’s something missing. And then it fashions that into a prompt which you can plug into the discussion model. And then your answer will be generated. packet of programs that work together in LegalAI is very powerful.

Dania Foo (09:49.048): These days, there seems to be an increase in the uptake of AI tools in legal practice, but there’s still a lot of concern and caution with using them in legal practice because whenever we tend to hear about lawyers using AI tools, it’s usually because they’ve landed themselves in some hot water, in that they’ve relied on cases or legislation that an AI has just hallucinated, and they’ve relied on that. So does Legal AI Assistant have the capability of producing hallucinated information and what are the safeguards in place if any that you use to ensure that you’re not one of those cases.

Dicky Abraham: So Legal AI is still an AI, so it does hallucinate cases. But as I said before, it’s designed specifically for lawyers in Australia and New Zealand. So the fact that it’s designed for lawyers in itself reduces the amount of hallucinations.

Secondly, the way it generates its answer really does help eliminate that problem. Because every time it generates an answer, it provides footnotes. for all the cases of legislation it’s referred to. So there is a link at the bottom with the case or the particular legislation it’s referred to and you can click the link and it’ll take you to the webpage.

If it hallucinates a case, and this is my experience, often that link doesn’t exist or that link is not necessarily there. So that’s immediately a red flag. So you’d obviously pick that up straight away.

Again, I go back to working with a graduate lawyer. If the graduate lawyer produces a piece of work, you’re not going to accept that piece as it is. You’re going to scrutinize it. You’re going to make sure the footnotes and the references are accurate. So you will check it. It’s the same principle. And it makes it easier. You don’t need to go and actually search the case. The link is there. If the link doesn’t pop up, then you need to interrogate that case or explore that a bit more and make sure it’s not a hallucinated case or a piece of legislation.

So Legal AI is quite good that way. It makes it easy. That doesn’t mean that it does not hallucinate material because it’s still an AI. So you just need to be diligent about it. And if you check the references and if you go through and check the footnotes, it shouldn’t really be a problem.

Dania Foo: The other big issue that lawyers tend to be concerned about is confidentiality. When you’re plugging things into something like chat GPT, that’s not confidential at all. So you’ve got to make sure that you’re not putting in confidential information and those sorts of things.

Is that the same for Legal AI Assistant? Do you need to go and anonymize everything that you’re working on on?

Dicky Abraham: No, you don’t need to, I don’t anonymize anything that I’m working, any matters that I’m working on if it’s, if I’m putting it through legal AI. Legal AI does not use your data to train its models. The developers use their own data, so they’re not using your client data to train the model.

Secondly, it is ISO 27001 certified, which, and it is also SOC type two compliant as well, which are apparently the two highest ratings you can get. I know most of the practice management software are compliant with that sort of security ratings.

Dania Foo (13:16.226): So it will be akin to putting information into your practice management system.

Dicky Abraham: Exactly, exactly. You’re not waiving confidentiality or privilege when you upload a document to CLIO or whatever practice management system that you’re using. It’s the same principle here. Legal AI Assistant, the director was actually interviewed by the Law Institute Journal. in Victoria and there’s a great article where the director sets out exactly how it operates. So for all any of our viewers who is interested in that, by all means, please. And it was a recent edition as well. So by all means, feel free to check that out because it sets out exactly how it operates and it directly addresses these concerns.

It’s a fantastic piece of kit. I can’t recommend it highly and I’m not quite sure why it hasn’t taken off because to me it seems like the value for money it provides is incredible.

Dania Foo: Great to hear. I know that in my practice that would certainly be very helpful.

Dicky Abraham (14:16.16): I suppose it’s the question is for a solo practitioner like me, yeah, it’s easy to deploy that but when it comes to scaling it up for different firms and multiple licenses, it might be more expensive. But again, to me, the value it provides far outweighs its cost.

Dania Foo: So shall we move on then to your next AI tool?

Dicky Abraham: Sure, sure. The next AI tool I use is called Fireflies. It’s an AI transcription software. It attaches to all my conferences, all audio visual conferences, so Zoom, Microsoft Teams, whatever platform I use. It records everything I do, or everything, it records the whole conference, generates a transcript, and also generates a summary, a very detailed summary with action items. If I was to have a conference in person, I turn it on on my. telephone or on my mobile and it will do the same. It will record it and it will generate a transcript and a summary.

The reason I like Fireflies so much is because compared to some of the other software I’ve trialed, its accuracy is incredible. It is able to pick up spelling and various other grammar and everything else much better than other software that I’ve trialed at.

So I really like it, A, because it’s accurate and B, because I’m able to I have, there’s no real confusion about expectations.

Dania Foo (15:41.398): Yeah, mean, when you think about the fact that in a conference with a client, there’s usually a lot of information for the client to digest, to retain that information, and there’s usually action points for one or both of you to do and for a client to remember all of that can be challenging and often times, you know, lawyers might then have to go back to their desk after the conference, type out an email or a memo or something along those lines to then send to the client reminding them of what was talked about.

I presume that if Fireflies is producing a summary, you could just send that summary off to the client without having to do any additional work after that conference.

Dicky Abraham: Exactly, exactly. And as you can attest, when you attend a conference, you’re making a file out of the conference, but you’re not capturing everything in that file note. You’re scribbling down nodes, you’re trying to process information. There’s obviously things that you miss. That doesn’t happen with Fireflies. It captures everything. It generates a summary. and it also generates action items for each party in the conference.

So you’re able to send that to the client straight away and there’s no real confusion over what’s expected of the client. The client knows exactly what’s expected of me. So how many times, and you could probably say something about this, how many times have we as lawyers sought documents from clients and they’ve sent the documents but not all of it and we’ve had to go back.

I found that by using Fireflies in my practice, clients have a file note essentially where they can refer to it straight away and they know exactly what they need to respond to after the conference. So there’s no going back and forth.

I found that the instances of me going back and forth with clients is far less compared to what I did prior to Spurling Legal. So in that particular regard, it’s quite good because you’re managing everyone’s expectations and it’s a really easy tool to have.

Dania Foo: Yeah, and it probably helps with client satisfaction as well because the clients then not going to, as you say, have to go back and forth with this and it’s not delaying you working on the matter.

Dicky Abraham: Exactly, exactly. So it helps with efficiency, it helps with managing client expectations, because as you know, a file note in itself is not in a form where we can send it to a client. It’s a note scribbled by us. If we were going to send it to a client, we’re going to have to refine it further, make sure it’s in a form that we can send it to the client. With Fireflies, you already get that in the summary. So we can send it through straight away.

Dania Foo: It seems like such a simple tool, but very effective.

Dicky Abraham (18:30.918): And I mean, if firms are transitioning to using AI, this is probably the first tool they want to start with because it eliminates the need to take file notes, essentially. And file notes are powerful pieces of contemporaneous evidence. You know that. I know that. It eliminates that human error from that particular aspect of the job. And it’s not expensive. Fireflies, I pay 35 Australian dollars or something like that a month. So it’s pretty reasonable in terms of price. If firms are looking to transition to AI or using, and they don’t know where to start, this is probably the first sort of program they want to look at because it does assist in managing those client expectations really well.

Dania Foo: And is it able to integrate with your practice management system? Not yet, not yet, because Fireflies is not just catered for the legal industry.

Dicky Abraham: You can use it as an account and you can use it for any industry really. It does integrate with certain software, but not necessarily legal practice management software. I simply download the summary and place it on the file. It’s a drag and drop. It would be great if it did, but you know what? You can’t have everything.

Dania Foo: No, you can’t.

Dicky Abraham: And the last tool now I think we want to discuss is the AI time tracker which I’ve trialed a few and I’m still working on settling on one, but essentially it just tracks what I do on my computer. It tracks the task that I’m doing. It generates a summary for that task and it generates a detailed narrative as well. That’s what an AI time tracker does.

Dania Foo: Lawyers who time bill and most most lawyers bill based on time, practice management systems generally already have like a timer, right? So when you start on a task, you turn the timer on, you do what you need to do, and then you turn your timer off when you stop. then you essentially go in and just type out, know, drafting letter of advice to so-and-so regarding such and such, and you just put in how much time you spent on the matter.

Now, that, just doing that in itself with that amount of detail doesn’t generally take up an enormous amount of time. It could be a 30 to 40 second exercise. So given that a tool like that already exists in a system that the firm’s already paid for, do you think the benefits you get from having an additional AI tool that does that outweighs the costs?

Dicky Abraham: Oh, absolutely. I think it definitely does because how much detail can you insert in 30 or 40 seconds?

Dania Foo: Not very much.

Dicky Abraham: …you often get time entries where it just simply says email to so-and-so regarding so-and-so and that’s it. It doesn’t have any further detail. With the AI time tracker, it tracks exactly how much time you spend on a task and it generates a detailed narrative for that task. It is able to recognize that…Let’s take the example of if you were to draft an email to a client regarding a potential issue and you refer to case law while you’re drafting that email. So you went and opened up a web portal or web page, looked at case law, you looked at legislation, and then you’ve referenced that in your email. An AI time tracker will intuitively track all of that and realize that that particular email involved work which related to researching the law on this particular issue or on this particular case and also this particular legislation and it will incorporate all that into the narrative.

So it won’t be just drafting an email to so and so regarding so and so. It will say drafting an email to so and so regarding so and so considered this particular case, studied this particular legislation, formed an opinion. and then you get a detailed narrative for that particular email.

So that way I think it’s quite powerful because when you have such detailed time entries, the scope for dispute is minimal because if you spend 10 minutes ddrafting an email and a lot of that time was trying to research the law and various other pieces of legislation or cases in relation to that email, then the AI time tracker will reflect that in the narrative.

Dania Foo: I think that’s a good point because what you type in the narrative is what appears on the bill and the client sees the product that they receive, this email, and I think sometimes clients think that, I’ll shoot an email to the lawyer. They probably know the answer off the top of their heads and they can just shoot an email back, but they don’t necessarily see what goes into producing the email. So it’s considering the law, looking at all the documents and all the rest of it. And all they see is just this, you know, two or three paragraph email and go, why did they charge me that much for it?

Dicky Abraham: Exactly, exactly. And that’s exactly the point with an AI time tracker. Whether you spend two minutes on an email or 10 minutes on an email, the narrative is going to be the same. It’s going to have that detail. It’ll explain exactly what happened in that time you spent drafting that email. The other benefit of the AI time tracker is if you have panel clients, for example, you can provide the particular agreement that you subscribe to as a panel client to the AI and it will draft the time narratives in accordance with that agreement.

So it intuitively learns how you like to draft the narrative and then it will provide suggestions so that it complies with the legal agreement that you’re subscribing to. let’s, for example, if the agreement says you can’t use the term review or study, it will provide suggestions. It will say, “this does not comply with your SLA.” So you will have to provide recommendations, i.e. change it to analyze, to consider.

So that is quite handy and quite powerful for lawyers who have panel clients. Look, it’s a fantastic tool to have. And again, it’s one of those things where if you are a law firm looking to transition to AI, do you need it? Like you said, probably not. but it will make life a lot easier.

Dania Foo (25:17.844): And I think, know, especially when we’re not necessarily required to provide that kind of detail on the bills.

Dicky Abraham: Exactly.

Dania Foo: I guess, you know, sometimes I wonder whether that’s what clients want. Is that what’s been your experience in clients’ feedback when they see this bill with such detail on it?

Dicky Abraham: Look, my clients really like it. I’ve had one client who said, use multiple lawyers, and the feedback I got from him was that it’s great to see that detail, because he often queried why he’s getting charged half an hour for an email, and he looks at the email, and yes, it’s a substantive email, but does it take half an hour to draft that?

But now he looks at it and goes, right, I understand what’s involved in drafting that email. So he was quite pleased to have that feedback because he had the story, the narrative. B

ut then again, it depends on the clients as well. So some clients might just like the one line entry. The clients I have and the feedback I’ve received have been that it’s good to see that narrative. And I think the more detail I have, the less likely there is going to be dispute about it. So…

Dania Foo: And because as a litigator, that’s what…

Dicky Abraham: My life revolves around disputes, so I want to try and eliminate any disputes relating to my bills, and the best way to do that is to be as transparent as possible. But yeah, so it’s a great tool, and I really enjoy using it. Is it necessary? Probably not, but the way I practice, think it really adds value to my practice.

The last tool I use, and it’s not really a tool, it’s just a standard AI that I run on my computer. It’s basically there for me to be able to anonymize matters. It runs just on my laptop. Everything I do is saved on my hard drive. The obvious disadvantage is that because it’s running on my laptop and using my memory, it slows the computer down a bit. You don’t get those responses like you do instantly when you put it into Legal AI or various other models.

Dania Foo: Are you only using this for purposes of if you need to put information to chat GPT for example?

Dicky Abraham: Yeah, pretty much. I rarely use ChatGPT. The only times I use the AI that’s running on my computer is for prospective clients.

So if a client has a prospective inquiry and they send through, I don’t know, court documents or an order or something along those lines, and I need to get some information, I don’t necessarily create a file on legal AI. I don’t create a file on my practice management software until they sign a retainer. So in those circumstances, if I need to use an AI, I will anonymize it using LM Studio, and then I will use, I don’t know, one of those generic models that are out there. that’s if I need to use it. The instances are few and far between these days. Because I’ve got legal AI, I tend to rely on it quite a bit.

Dania Foo: So now we’ve talked quite a lot about how these different tools work and how you use it individually. When you were thinking about all of these different tools and what was the best tool for the task, was that the only consideration you had or were you approaching it more from the perspective of this is how I want to practice, how do I or what tools do I use or are available for me to be able to practice the way I want to.

Dicky Abraham: Well, it was a ladder and it’s because I had a very specific way I want to practice. So the Spurling Model of Cost which I designed is premised on the fact that there is cost certainty, there is cost transparency. In order to implement that model, I needed these systems. So my model doesn’t work without one of these systems. Let’s take the example.

If the AI time tracker isn’t there, my bills don’t have that detail.

If Fireflies isn’t there, I’m not able to send the summary to the client and I’m not able to use the transcript and feed it into Legal AI and generate a response in a game plan.

I have to do it manually, which takes time. So my whole model is based on all these systems working together in harmony.

So I started from the premise that I these items to make the model work and then I researched what sort of software is available. And I’m still doing it because I haven’t settled on an AI time tracker as yet. I’ve trialed a few. Some of them are quite good, some of them not so good, but I think I will be settling on one very shortly because it’s quite good.

Dania Foo: In law firms, the heart of running a law firm usually revolves around the practice management system. All of these different AI tools that you’ve talked about, not all of them seem to be able to integrate with your practice management system. How important is that for you, if at all, that the integration with your practice management system isn’t quite there yet? Is that important or is the integration in the sense of how the different AI tools and your practice management system is able to work alongside each other but cohesively, is that more important?

Dicky Abraham: For me, it’s more important that the software and the systems work together more cohesively than integrating with my practice management software. It will be an added bonus if all of them did. It will be even better if there was a practice management software that had an AI legal assistant, that had a transcription service, that had an AI time tracker. I would sign up for it straight away. Sounds like there’s a gap in the mock in it. But there isn’t.

So for me, what is important is that these systems work together to try and help me implement the Spurling Model of Costs. It might be different for another firm. They might want something that works with their practice management software because they’re not a new firm. They’ve already got their systems in place, so that takes priority.

So it’s up to each firm or each individual really what they prefer. I suspect newer firms or if you’re starting a new practice. you would want your systems in place and you choose, you would want, you would favor having various systems cohesively working together as opposed to each of them integrating with your practice management software.

Existing firms, on the other hand, might prefer the other option where the practice management software is central and everything has to integrate with that because that’s how all their lawyers work, that’s how they’ve been trained, it’ll cost quite a bit to retrain people with a completely new system.

So I think it’s quite subjective. I think it depends on each firm, to be honest.

Dania Foo: We’ve talked a lot about AI. Was there anything else you wanted to say before we moved on to the work from home case and work from home work?

Dicky Abraham: No, think we’ve covered that quite well. And I’m hoping that I’ve answered the questions that my colleagues posed to me in the feedback from the first episode. I don’t think I have much more to say on that other than the fact that all these systems, it’s not necessary. You don’t need everything, all the bells and whistles. You can, like I said, start with the most basic AI system, which is something like Fireflies and build to it.

But if you’re a newer practice or if you’re looking to practice on your own and setting up a new practice, then perhaps you might want to do a bit of research into how you want to set up the way you want to.

Dania Foo: It sounds like, mean, for new firms especially that you’d be able to offer a lot more in terms of service to the clients with fewer personnel and fewer employees. Now whether or not, obviously that’s a positive or a negative thing in terms of skill set of young lawyers out there and you know, being able to train up in a firm and those sorts of questions, I think that’s probably not within the scope of today’s episode.

Dicky Abraham: Yeah.

Dania Foo: It’s, I think, concern.

Dicky Abraham: Yes, I think so. Look, I think we’ve covered the AI issue quite well. But shall we move on to working from home? I know you’re keen to get onto that. Did you get a chance to read the case that I sent to you, Collins v. InterSystems Australia Pty Ltd. And for our viewers, the reference is 2025 FWC1976. Did you get a chance to read that?

Dania Foo: I did get a chance to read it, yes.

Dicky Abraham: What did you make of it?

Dania Foo: Before I properly read the case, I thought that I didn’t really like the decision very much. I didn’t like the outcome. Collins had requested two days working from home because he’s got school aged children that he said he needed to care for. And I thought, well, that was a pretty reasonable request. And for it to be refused, I thought was a bit harsh. That was my initial thought. And then when I actually read the case and read what the law says, my views changed.

Dicky Abraham: What does the law say?

Dania Foo: So what I didn’t know, and I must say I’m not an employment lawyer over here, but what the law says, and this is the Fair Work Act, is that employees, and not all employees, but employees generally do have a right to request flexible working arrangements if particular circumstances apply to them, such as having the need to care for young children. And if you set out that request in writing and if you’re able to set out why your request for working from home arrangement is necessary due to your circumstances, then your employer can only refuse your request if there are reasonable business grounds to do so and after they’ve tried to come to compromise with you.

Dicky Abraham (35:29.354): Exactly. And look, I shared the same view as well. When I initially read the case and I only had a cursory review of the case, I didn’t read the entire case, I thought the decision seemed a bit harsh because Collins was mandated to go back into the office five days a week. he requested to work from home two days a week. That request was rejected by the employer and the Fair Work Commission sided with that. I thought that was a bit harsh, but then when you read the decision, it’s quite clear that the Fair Work Commission had no option but to make that decision. The evidence that was available meant that that was the only decision the Fair Work Commission could come to.

Dania Foo: And for Mr Collins, mean, really, think he, if he had set out in his request why he needed that work from home, not just why, but how that two days working from home would assist him with his parental responsibilities, I think perhaps that might have been a different story, at least partly, at least that would have been a valid request.

Dicky Abraham: Yeah, I think so. I think the fact that the employee engaged in a dialogue with Collins as well, they wanted to try and accommodate this, but they couldn’t. They tried to offer flexible arrangements for him to pick up his kids from school, from memory, and he rejected that.

It wasn’t quite clear to the Commission why he needed to work from home to care for his kids. He didn’t articulate that well enough. So I think that’s where it fell through.

The timing of the decision is curious because as I understand it, this is my memory, the decision came out a couple of weeks ago before Victoria decided that they wanted to try and create a right to work from home as opposed to a right to request to work from home.

So the timing was a bit curious as to whether one led to the other, we don’t know. But if that right existed, then Collins would have been able to work from home. He wouldn’t even have to make the request, he would have had to just tell his employer, I’m from home two days a week.

What do you make of Victoria’s push there? Do you have a view on that?

Dania Foo (37:30.606): I think employees would absolutely favour it of course, I think that works in their favour, but the commentary around Victoria passing that law has been quite interesting because from what I’ve seen all the commentaries around, well does the state even have the power to actually pass such a law?

Dicky Abraham: Correct, correct. And the issue really is conflict, isn’t it? Because all laws regarding employment is governed by the Fair Work Act. That’s the Commonwealth law, that’s the federal jurisdiction. Now Victoria’s trying to enact a law and that obviously comes in conflict with the federal jurisdiction. And as you know, if there’s a conflict between state and federal law, federal law prevails. So it’ll be interesting to see how Victoria gets around that particular issue. But I think it’s…

Dania Foo: I think they’re trying to get around it by saying it’s an anti-discrimination law, aren’t they?

Dicky Abraham: Look, yeah, I think that was suggested from the commentary and dialogue. I think we’ll just have to watch the space because I’d be curious to see how they get around that particular issue. We’re not constitutional lawyers, so… But it is interesting because if they do manage to get around that issue, I suspect it will follow across other states potentially. But yeah, look, interesting topic in terms of working from home. And as you correctly pointed out, not a lot of people might not realize that you have a right to request to work from home.

Dania Foo (39:04.832): No, I certainly didn’t before I read the case.

Dicky Abraham: I was aware of it because I’ve dealt with employment disputes, but I’d imagine if you don’t work in the employment space, you wouldn’t know.

Dania Foo: No.

Dicky Abraham: So I suppose it’s good to educate people about that as well. Anything else you want to have a chat about? I think we’ve spoken enough for this episode.

Dania Foo: I think so.

Dicky Abraham: All right. Well, thank you for joining us on the second episode of Spurling Legal. If you have any questions regarding this episode, feel free to get in touch. My name is Dicky Abraham. Principal Lawyer at Spurling Legal.

Dania Foo: And I’m Dania Foo. Thank you for joining us and we’ll see you next time.