Meeting in the White Space: The Discourse of First Nations Client and Legal Practitioner Relations

Australian Indigenous people are overrepresented as clients of solicitors, yet there is little research into the professional relations between solicitors and Indigenous clients. Solicitors and clients meet in a “white” legal space confounded by the compound complexities of Australia’s colonial past and colonized present. Within this space, solicitors practice as subjects constrained by a professional governance regime which excludes consideration of client Indigeneity. Creative and divergent professionalism is required to enact procedural justice for Indigenous clients from within this system. Methods of supporting solicitors to practice in ways which acknowledge and incorporate Indigenous ways of being, doing, and knowing remain unexamined or inconsistent and uncertain at individual, organizational, and professional levels. Cultural safety and Indigenous cultural competence are practice strategies widely implemented throughout medicine and health organizations to improve Indigenous client relations using enacted principles such as respect, reciprocity, reflexivity, and decolonization. The popularity of the strategies in clinical environments points to both the dynamism of the strategies and their contextual definition. The potential of these approaches to enrich legal practice with Indigenous clients is worthy of consideration and untested.