Hello, welcome to this legally wise mini bite. I'm Jacqui Brauman principal solicitor at TBA law and Ceo and founder of Legally Wise Women and were doing these uh mini bikes in between each of our longer from podcast episodes. And so far I've done four legally wise me bites on where to start, when you have a legal problem and also how to find and hire a right lawyer and assess the skill set and how to best work with them. This episode I'd like to talk a little bit about some alternative dispute resolution tools and methods that you can use rather than going to a lawyer and getting caught up in that system which may not have the fastest or most cost effective way of resolving your problem. Now there are an increasing amount of online and do it yourself tools to use rather than going legal.

So some of those include a really great one that has been developed for people separating called America so check that one out. There are places like justice connect answers service which is an online tool to ask a legal question without having to find a lawyer assess whether they're the right one, go for an appointment. So you can just ask a legal question which can be a really great place to start as well. But for actual tools that help you resolve a dispute, it's really important. You have a look at some of the services that are available like consumer affairs or fair trading in your state if you have a consumer problem or a rental problem. They have free dispute resolution facilities. If you lodge a dispute and go through that process. Other services includes the ombudsman's and I think that these are really underutilized and a really great place for people to use to resolve legal problems that they have.

And there are so many different types of industry ombudsman to help you resolve disputes. So government decisions, if you're not happy with the government decision, there's commonwealth and state ombudsman's for those financial and banking and insurance, there is an ombudsman for that for telecommunications. If you have issues with your bill or changing providers, water and energy, aged care privacy, if there's been a privacy breach for work, there is fair work, both for employers and employees. And then if you run a small business, there are multiple ombudsman's that can help. There are your state small business commission which has dispute resolution facilities as well as the Australian small business and family enterprise ombudsman, which is an amazing service and you can do disputes internally in your own business.

You can do disputes between businesses with suppliers so on and so forth. And some of the dispute resolution tools have a small cost depending on your income and assets, but the majority of them are free, you lied to the dispute online. Uh the person at the ombudsman will talk to each party will arrange either a time to have a phone or online. Conciliation of some kind or sometimes all it is is this person goes backwards and forwards like a shuttle between you making offers and trying to resolve it. So please don't let a dispute go. Don't just go, I don't know how to deal with this. I don't know how to find a lawyer utilize some of these alternatives because they're so useful and they cover such a wide range of legal problems that you might come across.

So all that being said next time I do illegally wise many bite. I'm also going to be talking about alternative dispute resolution and I'm going to be talking about some of the processes to use alternative dispute resolution other than these services. So Check out that podcast in four podcasts time. Otherwise, if you want to reach out to me and just ask a question and I can point you in the right direction. You can email me Jackie at legally wise women dot com dot au. Talk to you soon. Thanks. Mhm. Yeah.