The Arena
One of the themes within the local government sector in recent years is capacity building: the upgrading of resources within local governments to enable them to be more effective and efficient.
The path forward in this arena includes the upgrading of the skills and knowledge of officers and councillors through education and training. That includes improvements in their knowledge of the legal environment in which local governments operate.
Why Civic Legal?
The Civic Legal team do more than provide legal services to you; we invest hundreds of hours of research and development to craft workshops and seminars to educate staff and elected members within your local government on relevant legal issues.
We do not just add to the discussion of the rights and wrongs of relevant legislation, we strive to clarify your roles and responsibilities, so that you can function with greater insight and confidence. We also identify legal issues that are not apparent to many local governments and then provide strategies to deal with them. We are prepared to travel to any local government in Western Australia – no matter how remote. Many local governments have found our seminars and workshops to be a valuable addition to their professional training and development programme. Some have pointed to a shift in culture as a result of such programmes.
In these endeavours, Civic Legal has set new benchmarks in terms of presentation style, audio-visual aids and take-away resources for local governments in the form of hardcopy reference materials.
Example of a previous seminar:
In 2016, Anthony Quahe and his team created and presented workshops for the Institute of Public Works Engineers Australia (IPWEA) as part of their legal education programme. IPWEA is a key industry body, and the majority of IPWEA members are employed by local governments.
The workshops, most recently presented in September 2023, are entitled ‘Legal Risk Management for Local Government Engineers’.
The workshops provide in-depth education to local government officers on construction contracts, tendering and contract management in the local government context. Attendees have remarked on how very valuable these seminars are.
