Your Rights
You have the right to a safe, confidential and ethical quality legal service tailored to your needs.
Our Principles
- We treat every sex worker with dignity, care and without judgment.
- We recognise that trust and confidentiality are essential to delivering safe legal support.
- Our practice is grounded in respect for sex workers’ rights, autonomy and lived experiences.
- We actively challenge stigma and its harmful impacts.
- We listen deeply and are guided by sex workers’ choices and priorities.
- Our legal services are tailored to meet the diverse needs of each individual
Names, Conflict Checks & Confidentiality
We understand how important it is for many sex workers to keep their legal name private. You are welcome to use any name you choose when speaking with us, and we will use that name in all communication with you and externally.
To provide legal advice, however, we do need to know your legal name. This is because lawyers must make sure we are acting in your best interests and not advising anyone on the opposite side of a dispute. To do this, we are required to carry out what’s called a conflict check.
A conflict check simply means we look in our secure file system to see whether your legal name appears in any previous matter we’ve worked on.
If your name does not appear, we can provide you with legal advice.
If it does appear, we will talk with you about the next steps and make sure you can still access support.
These checks are part of the professional conduct rules that all lawyers must follow. You can read more about these rules on the Victorian Legal Services Board website.
Confidentiality
Your privacy is extremely important to us. Legal professional privilege means that almost everything you share with our lawyers, or with any administrative staff supporting your matter, is confidential.
This protection covers all forms of communication, including conversations, texts, phone calls, emails, and letters, as well as any documents we create based on that information.
Legal professional privilege applies to all communications that relate to giving you legal advice. It also means we will not share information about your legal matter with anyone supporting you (for example, a caseworker, friend, or service provider) unless you give us clear and express consent.
There are very limited circumstances where the Solicitors’ Conduct Rules require or permit lawyers to break confidentiality. These situations are rare, and they only apply when necessary to:
- Prevent the probable commission of a serious criminal offence, or
- Prevent imminent serious physical harm to you or someone else.
The key word here is “serious”- these exceptions apply only in extreme situations.
External Communications
We will only act on your instructions. This means we will not contact anyone about your legal matter, or send any letters, emails, or other enquiries, unless you have clearly asked us to do so.
Whenever we communicate with others on your behalf, we will use the name you prefer.
We also take steps to protect your privacy. When we make enquiries or contact other organisations for you, we do not identify ourselves as part of the Sex Worker Legal Program. We simply refer to our organisation, Southside Justice, without mentioning the program.