Arts Law gives preliminary advice and information to artists and arts organisations across all artforms on a wide range of arts related legal and business matters including contracts, copyright, business names and structures, defamation, insurance and employment.
Initial telephone legal advice is free. To lodge your request for legal advice please contact us by telephone during business hours (EST) on +61 2 9356 2566. Callers outside the Sydney metropolitan area can contact us on our tollfree number by dialling 1800 221 457. Please note that we do not accept requests for legal advice by email.
We respect your rights to privacy and confidentiality. This means we will keep all information provided by you confidential unless you give us permission to give information about you to a third party or we have an obligation under the law to do so.
Limits to our service
There may be occasions when the Arts Law Centre is unable to provide assistance. For example, if one party in a dispute or transaction has already contacted us for advice; or if it is considered more appropriate for a matter to be referred elsewhere. Also, Arts Law can only advise on arts related matters.
Free Telephone Advice Service
Arts Law will provide free initial telephone advice to any caller on an arts-related legal matter where there is no conflict of interest or potential conflict of interest. As a general rule, legal officers will only provide a “one off” telephone advice on a discrete matter. Telephone advice takes on average 30-45 minutes. Subscription is mandatory if the caller requires an appointment with a Legal Advice Night Solicitor, if files are opened, or if they are using the service regularly (e.g., more than once in a 12 month period on the same issue in a given matter or where more than a total of five advices on separate matters have been given to the caller by the Centre). The Free Telephone Advice service is subject to Arts Law’s Legal Service Guidelines which can be viewed HERE as well as other policies which will be explained upon contacting Arts Law.
Legal Advice Nights (LAN)
If your enquiry requires Arts Law to review any documentation, our policy requires that you become a subscriber with us and we will process your enquiry as an extended legal advice service or Legal Advice Night. This means we will outsource your enquiry to solicitors that work for us voluntarily or one of the Arts Law lawyers will review it internally, depending on the agreement sent in for review and the capacity of the lawyers at Arts Law.
Once you have subscribed you are entitled to up to 6 consultations with an Arts Law volunteer solicitor. Each consultation is up to 2 hours (though it may be shorter) in duration and we try and limit this service to 1 consultation per month. We can only advise once on an agreement or situation.
Our volunteer solicitors provide their time voluntarily under the pro-bono scheme, and therefore we can not guarantee that we will be able to source a solicitor to advise you, but it is rare that we cannot.
Please contact Arts Law for more information, to determine whether your enquiry is suitable or to make a request for this service. The LAN service is subject to Arts Law’s Legal Service Guidelines which can be viewed HERE as well as other policies which will be explained upon contacting Arts Law.
Best practice guidelines
Organisations outside the arts community (councils, art competition organizers, art related festival organizers, etc) sometimes call Arts Laws for advice on terms and conditions for working with artists, such as terms and conditions of competitions, artists in residence agreements, etc. By advising such organizations, Arts Law would normally be precluded from subsequently giving legal advice to an artist (or writer or performer etc) in relation to those terms and conditions. This is because of the risk of breach of duty of confidentiality and the potential conflict of interest. Please click HERE for more information.
