Staff Competency and Supervision
Improve staff training, trauma-informed supervision, and cultural understanding in legal services, for both lawyers and other professionals.
The With You training programme, designed to equip staff with a comprehensive understanding of trauma-informed practice and a rights-based approach to legal practice. The section also highlights the role of trauma-informed reflexive practice and trauma-informed supervision in fostering an environment of continuous learning and introspection. Finally, the concept of communities of practice and the significance of cultural supervision are explored, emphasising the value of interdisciplinary learning, collaboration, and cultural sensitivity in delivering effective and compassionate legal services.
Training
Training is crucial for embedding trauma-informed, rights-based practices in your legal assistance organisation because it provides a fundamental pathway to understanding, interpreting, and applying these principles effectively in day-to-day operations.
Training offers the opportunity to foster a shared understanding and commitment among your staff. It can help to create a culture that is supportive and empowering, which is not only beneficial for your clients, but also for staff well-being. This culture helps to ensure the principles of trauma-informed, rights-based practice are consistently applied across all aspects of your organisation's operations.
With You: Trauma-informed and rights-based training
With You training represents an essential opportunity foryour lawyers and other professionals in your organisation to significantly enhance their capacity to provide effective, compassionate, and appropriate legal assistance.
With You equips your workforce with a thorough understanding of trauma-informed practice. This means that they'll learn how to recognise the signs and symptoms of trauma, understand the widespread impact of trauma, and respond by fully integrating knowledge about trauma into practice.
With You embeds a rights-based approach to legal practice. This framework is centred on the recognition of the inherent dignity and rights of all individuals, particularly those experiencing mental distress or poor mental health. A rights-based approach promotes equality, accountability, and non-discrimination, which can significantly enhance the quality and effectiveness of legal services provided.
Furthermore, the codesign nature of With You means that the training has been shaped by people who receive and deliver legal assistance services. Therefore, the content of the training is directly relevant and applicable to the work of your lawyers and other professionals. Unlike other training, With You is tailored to address the real-world challenges they face and to meet the needs of the clients they serve.
With You training is free to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander legal services, family violence prevention legal services, community legal centres and legal aid commissions.
Trauma-informed supervision
The skill of reflection is key to effective trauma-informed legal practice. Legal education traditionally emphasises reason and rationality, and does not develop the skill of recognising the impact of the work on the lawyer, or the lawyer’s impact on the client. However, there is extensive research to show that affect (including emotions) and cognition are intertwined, and a false separation impairs reasoning and decision-making in all spheres of life.
Your legal service can support lawyers and other professionals to embed trauma-informed practice by creating an environment that encourages continuous learning and reflection. This can entail regular team sessions to equip lawyers and other professionals with the knowledge and skills needed to understand the nuances of trauma and its impact on clients and vicariously on your workforce. The organisation can also facilitate peer mentoring and supervision schemes, where lawyers and other professionals can share experiences, discuss challenging cases, and gain insights from colleagues. Fostering open communication about trauma will help lawyers reflect on their own biases, assumptions and emotional responses.
Trauma-informed supervision examines the impact of repeated exposure to vicarious trauma on the lawyer and examines the lawyer’s engagement with clients in distress. Reflective, trauma-informed supervision involves more than checking the accuracy of legal advice.
It can offer a wealth of benefits, both for professional development and personal wellbeing. One of the key wellbeing benefits is the role that trauma-informed supervision plays in managing stress and mitigating burnout. Additionally, trauma-informed supervision can assist in minimising the effects of vicarious trauma and secondary traumatic stress, contributing to a sustainable career in the legal assistance sector.
On the professional front, trauma-informed supervision can enhance emotional and communication skills, both of which are essential for effective trauma-informed legal practice. It can also encourage ethical practice by providing a space for reflection and discussion around ethical dilemmas and professional responsibilities. Furthermore, effective trauma-informed supervision could potentially contribute to worker retention. By fostering a supportive and nurturing work environment, it could enhance job satisfaction and commitment to the profession, which can lead to a decrease in turnover rates.
Other professionals, such as social workers, psychologists and peer workers, will already have well established approaches for trauma-informed supervision, which simply need to be resourced by organisations. Professionals from disciplines without traditions of trauma-informed supervision, such as administration staff, will require bespoke approaches. Lawyers can draw on lessons from the clinical legal trauma-informed supervision provided to new lawyers, extending this successful approach to provide support to more experienced practitioners and enhancing it with lessons from other disciplines.
There have been some attempts to implement reflective practices in the legal assistance sector. These have largely involved mental health or allied professionals providing group trauma-informed supervision to lawyers and have met with mixed results depending on the practice area, organisational culture and dynamics of the particular team. It appears that lawyers would most likely benefit from one-to-one supervision from experienced lawyers trained in best practice trauma-informed supervision, although group trauma-informed supervision models led by allied health professionals have also had some success. Legal services should build on what has worked in these other settings, trialling different approaches to find out what works best for their teams. Trauma-informed supervision must be tailored to particular practice areas and service cultures to be most successful.
Tips for establishing reflective supervision for lawyers
Self-reflection: Supervision should provide a space for self-reflection, which can prevent errors, improve competence, mitigate the impacts of trauma exposure, and support critical reflection on the legal system.
Creating a safe space for emotional work: Supervision should create a safe space for emotional work, including supporting lawyers to manage empathy and identification in the lawyering process and supporting lawyers to identify and deal with vicarious trauma. Lawyers should feel able to share their mistakes without embarrassment or fear of negative consequences.
Trauma-informed supervision: Supervision should be trauma-informed, focusing on the lawyer’s experience rather than apportioning blame.
Self-care: Supervision should model or encourage self-care, which can range from prioritising fundamental needs to maintaining strong social bonds and building self-awareness.
Training and support for supervisors: Supervisors should receive adequate training and support to fulfil their role, which may include mental health training, training in how to provide effective direction or feedback, and ongoing support such as regular team leader meetings.
Identifying burnout and vicarious trauma: Supervisors should be trained and supported to identify the early signs of burnout and vicarious trauma and to develop strategies to address and respond to these issues.
Strong supervisory relationship: The quality of the supervisor-supervisee relationship is crucial for effective supervision. This involves fostering a collaborative relationship and individualising supervision to the needs of the supervisee.
Required work practice: Supervision should be compulsory and provided within protected time. It should be ongoing and not limited to the early stages of a career.
Frequency and length: Supervision should be regular and consistent, with sessions lasting at least 60 minutes.
One example of reflexive practice is in the Sisters Inside Guide to our model of service for new Sisters Inside workers (below)
Other resources include the Victorian Government’s Family violence, sexual assault and child wellbeing best practice supervision.
Reflexive Practice: Sisters Inside Weekly Inclusive Support Meetings
One example of reflexive practice is in the Sisters Inside Guide to our model of service for new Sisters Inside workers.
The backbone of Inclusive Support is a weekly meeting where workers get together and
consult each other about what is going on. This is not a staff meeting, and it follows the
weekly staff meeting. The Inclusive Support Meeting keeps workers up to date with whether individual women are inside prison, have been released or are facing court. It lets other workers know of likely upcoming issues, and also when women’s lives are going well and they don’t need as much support. But it does much more as well.
As well as being a practical, information sharing exercise, the Inclusive Support Meeting is an educational tool, a problem-solving opportunity and also a mechanism for debriefing workers. In discussing the weekly workload, staff share their different strategies. We talk about what has worked well, and what hasn’t. Because the work we do is so diverse, and so unpredictable, what has worked in some situations and with some women, won’t work with others. By chucking ideas and strategies around as a group, we draw on the strength of all our intelligences.
Communities of practice
Supervision can also be undertaken between organisations, in communities of practice that exist across sectors. A community of practice is a group of people who share a common concern, a set of problems, or an interest in a topic, and who come together to fulfil both individual and group goals. In this context, it would be a group focused on understanding and applying trauma-informed and rights-based principles in their work.
Such a community could serve as a space for professionals from various legal services to come together to share knowledge and insights, learn from each other, discuss common challenges, and collaboratively develop solutions. By bringing together individuals from different organisations and different roles within those organisations, these communities can foster a culture of interdisciplinary learning and collaboration.
Members could share the latest research and resources, learn about new services and interventions, and develop more coordinated approaches to complex matters. This would not only benefit individual members in terms of enhancing their knowledge and skills but would also contribute to more consistent, effective practices across the sector.
Moreover, these communities could help to reduce the isolation often experienced by professionals in this field, particularly those in rural and remote settings, or collocated in external teams and organisations. Communities of practice can provide a supportive network where members can discuss their experiences, explore their struggles, and celebrate their successes. This could contribute to reducing vicarious trauma and promoting well-being among professionals in the sector.
Community of practice: National Legal Aid Allied Professionals Committee
The National Legal Aid Allied Professionals Committee plays a key role in enhancing the effectiveness of allied professionals in legal aid commissions across Australia. This committee serves as a hub of collaboration, enabling members to access a supportive network of peers where they can freely share experiences, resources, and insights. This dynamic exchange of knowledge serves to enrich the collective understanding and expertise of allied professionals within the sector.
One of the committee's critical objectives is to establish an evidence base that can inform and improve practice. By gathering and disseminating information about what works and why, the committee supports the evolution of practices that are more effective, efficient, and responsive to the needs of clients.
The committee also acts as a platform to amplify the understanding of the role and value of allied professionals in legal aid commissions. By highlighting the diverse ways in which these professionals contribute to the delivery of legal services, the committee helps to garner recognition and respect for their work, enhancing their professional standing.
The committee also facilitates service collaboration and development by identifying and promoting opportunities for different legal aid commissions to work together. This collaborative approach not only fosters innovation and learning but also contributes to more efficient use of resources.
Finally, the committee provides practice leadership, support and advice to National Legal Aid, helping to ensure that the broader organisation is informed by the insights and experiences of allied professionals on the ground. This helps to ensure that the strategic decisions made by National Legal Aid are grounded in a deep understanding of practical realities.
The committee’s Terms of Reference are available in Supporting Resources in this toolkit.
Cultural Supervision
The With You consultation process identified the specific and varied needs of First Nations people and other culturally and linguistically diverse groups, and stakeholders noted that cultural supervision would be one way to address this and embed existing cultural safety training. In 2018 the Family Violence Prevention Legal Services (FVPLS) ‘trauma champion’ working group created a Clinical and Cultural Supervision Register, for use by FVPLSs across Australia, to track formal and informal mentoring and support, but the practice has not spread widely beyond this.
Cultural supervision acknowledges and respects the unique cultures, histories, and experiences of these communities. For lawyers and other professionals working with First Nations people, this can mean recognising the impact of colonisation, understanding the importance of land and community ties, and respecting cultural practices and protocols. For other diverse communities, cultural supervision can help your workforce understand unique cultural nuances and norms, language considerations, and the social issues affecting these groups.
By understanding these contexts, your lawyers and other professionals can provide more culturally sensitive and effective legal advice. For instance, they can consider cultural factors in legal decision-making, or advocate for clients in a manner that acknowledges their cultural experiences and values.
Cultural supervision also aids in establishing stronger rapport and trust with clients from these communities. Clients are more likely to feel understood and respected when their cultural backgrounds are acknowledged. This can lead to improved communication and collaboration, which is critical for successful legal representation.
Furthermore, cultural supervision can help combat biases, stereotypes, and systemic issues that can impact First Nations people and other diverse communities. This can play a role in promoting fairness and equality in legal processes and outcomes.
Additionally, providing cultural supervision can improve your organisation's standing within these communities. It sends a strong message that your organisation values cultural diversity and is committed to serving these communities with respect and understanding.
Finally, cultural supervision supports your organisation's broader commitments to reconciliation and multiculturalism. By educating your workforce about the unique challenges and perspectives of First Nations and other culturally diverse communities, you can contribute to a more inclusive and culturally safe legal system.
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