Lawyers are obliged to act in the interests of their clients, however, it is not clear how lawyers should do this in practice. Should lawyers follow their clients' instructions without deviation, should they actively manage their clients' expectations, or as many studies suggest, do lawyers place their own interests first? This paper examines how lawyers interact with medical malpractice claimants. It reveals that lawyers take a client-aligned approach, where lawyers acknowledge their client's goals, but do not necessarily do what the client says. We argue that this approach is made necessary by legal and organisational constraints which limit the ability of lawyers to produce the types of outcomes that their clients want.

Personal Action Plans (PAPs) have been used to encourage client self-management within healthcare services, and are a novel innovation within legal services. This paper examines the use of PAPs by publicly funded family lawyers in England and Wales. It was intended that PAPs were written collaboratively between lawyers and clients in order to assist clients to clarify and resolve issues independently, and aid referrals to other service providers. Whereas self-management initiatives work best when service providers take a client-aligned approach, our research demonstrates that the PAPs were used as a means of managing clients’ expectations. We conclude by suggesting that while PAPs and other forms of self-management tools may work well in healthcare, they have limited potential in the provision of legal services for family law clients.

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Law Reform Commissions are permanent bodies which operate in common law countries, and are charged with the task of recommending law reform. The Commissions conduct research into the need for law reform, and it appears this research is guided by a common set of broad principles. A comparison of the ways in which the New Zealand Law Commission and the recently defunct Law Commission of Canada put these principles into practice reveals that different Commissions use different approaches when putting these principles into practice.These different approaches reflect the ways in which the role of law within society and the role of the Law Commissions in shaping the law are conceived. For some Commissions, legal reform is a technical process driven by a desire for increased efficiency and effectiveness. For other Commissions, legal reform is seen as directing, rather than merely reflecting, social and legal norms, and is self-consciously aimed towards achieving the goals of social justice.

This article traces the history of naming Cradle Mountain/Lake St. Clair (CM/LSC) National Park, in central western Tasmania, Australia, and, in doing so, will argue that toponyms constitute, rather than merely reflect, the landscape. The first official toponyms of the area were chosen by surveyors who visited the region in the early nineteenth century. These toponyms provide an insight into the European colonization of white settler nations, including the colonists’ desire to draw allegories between the newly discovered landscape and their European homeland. The surveyors were followed by local snarers, trappers, and farmers, and later by bushwalkers, and, through the toponyms given to CM/LSC, it is possible to consider the ways in which each of these groups has used this landscape. The article also examines other ways of knowing the landscape that are not necessarily reflected in the official toponyms. The construction of landscape through social practices such as naming is embedded within relationships of power, and this article will examine some of the ways in which the official toponyms may be contested. In particular, it will examine the differences between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal ways of naming, and thus knowing, landscapes.

Measurement of the Socio-Economic Status of Australian Higher Education Students' (2000) 39(2) Higher Education 223. 13 Donald S Anderson and John Western, 'Social Profiles of Students in Four Professions' (1970) 3(4) Quarterly Review of Australian Education 1. 14 Gale and Tranter, above n 9. 15 This also includes Australia's relatively high percentage of international students. Ibid 31. 16 McMillan and Western, above n 12.

In 2001, the Legal Services Commission (LSC) introduced a new pilot, the Family Advice and Information Network (FAInS), which recognised that family law clients typically face a cluster of legal and non-legal issues. Family lawyers involved in FAInS were encouraged to address a client’s legal problems, and then refer the client to other services for assistance with non-legal issues. In this way, family law clients were to be offered a holistic service, with the lawyer acting as a ‘case manager’ who helped match services to their client’s individual needs. This article presents data drawn from an evaluation of FAInS, and shows that lawyers did not regularly refer their clients to other services, with referrals largely being limited to mediation. We conclude that family lawyers are not necessarily the most appropriate gatekeepers, and propose a number of alternatives for providing a multi-agency approach to resolving family law issues.