New Year – New Sign – New (and old) Faces

Well, we are well into 2017.  I still can’t work out where January has gone.

Best Wilson Buckley closed over the Christmas period and we all had a much needed vacation.  2016 was a very busy year both personally and professionally.

The Christmas vacation allowed me to spend some much needed quality time with my wife and 3 daughters.  This included spending some time “back home” in Murwillumbah with my parents.

I use my father’s office in Murwillumbah as a visited office so that I can provide assistance to clients living in Northern New South Wales.  His “shingle” is much fancier than mine.  There is a sense of pride that I can put my “shingle” up under his in my old home town and try and give back to the community by offering my services.

Back into the swing of things

2017 has already had some highlights.  One of these was being able to assist my Legal Practice Director, Kara Best, in our first ever application for parentage transfer orders under the Surrogacy Act.  We were successful in our application and I will be writing a more specific post about this matter at a later date.  I would have to say it was up there in my top 5 moments of my legal career.

My colleague Katherine Marshall and I presented BWB’s Tips for Teachers and Schools presentation in late January to members of the Centenary State High School administration staff.

The presentation is designed to provide some assistance to teachers and allied staff in schools on navigating the complex world that is family law.  I’ll be writing a more detailed post about our presentation at a later date.  For the moment you can see Dan Buckley and John Patterson’s article Tips for Teachers on the BWB web site.

New (or for me old) Faces

I am thrilled to have been joined at BWB by Amity Anderson.  Amity and I were both a HopgoodGanim in Brisbane and worked together for many years.  Amity had the misfortune to have been my graduate for the first 6 months of her legal career!  Thankfully, due to timely swapping of the deck chairs on the Titanic (there are other nicknames for HG’s Family Law Section), Amity spent the balance of her career at HopgoodGanim working with Freda Wigan and having all of the bad habits I taught her well and truly straightened out by Freddy.

Amity will be the Practice Leader at our soon to be opened Ipswich Office and will be joined by Associate, Alecia Connor.

Amity, welcome to BWB. It’s so good to have your highly contagious smile around again!