Service
Secondment Lawyers for Australian Businesses
A named senior lawyer, embedded in your team for a defined period — on-site, hybrid or remote.
Secondment lawyers are external lawyers embedded inside your business for a defined period — three months, six months, a year. They sit with your team, use your systems, and answer to your leadership. The angle here is continuity: when an in-house team needs a real person in the seat, not an outsourced inbox.
When Secondment Is the Right Shape
- Parental leave cover — your GC or senior lawyer is out for 6–12 months and the work does not pause
- Gap between hires — someone has resigned and recruitment will take three to six months
- Project spike — a systems migration, an acquisition integration, a compliance uplift
- Board mandate — the board wants senior legal presence for a defined period without approving permanent headcount
- Pre-hire pilot — you are unsure whether the business needs a permanent GC; a secondment tests the shape
How Our Secondments Work
- Named lawyer, defined term. You know exactly who is arriving, when they start, and when they finish.
- Day rate or blended fee. Priced by the day or month, not the six-minute unit. Predictable for finance.
- On-site, hybrid or fully remote. Sydney and Melbourne on-site by default; national remote for anywhere else.
- Handover in and out. We build the handover pack going in and leave a clean handover on the way out.
- Firm backup. The seconded lawyer is not alone — they have the wider firm behind them for peer review and specialist coverage.
Typical Scope Inside a Secondment
- Full BAU legal load — contracts, employment, compliance
- Board and executive support
- Specific projects — privacy uplift, contract library rebuild, UCT remediation
- Coordination of external counsel on litigation or M&A
How It Differs From Retainer or Project Work
A retainer is remote-first and reactive — the lawyer supports the business but is not in it. A project engagement is time-boxed to one deliverable. A secondment is neither: it is a real person, in a real seat, doing whatever the business needs, for a defined period.
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