Arts Law gives legal advice to artists and arts organisations across all art forms on a wide range of arts related legal and business matters. Such matters include contracts, copyright, moral rights, trade marks, business names and structures, defamation, insurance and employment.
Legal advice is free or low-cost depending on the nature of your enquiry. Arts Law respects your rights to privacy and confidentiality. Accordingly, we will keep all information you provide to Arts Law confidential unless you give us permission to disclose information about you to a third party or we have a legal obligation to do so.
Lodge a request online using our legal query form. Alternatively, contact us by telephone and leave a message requesting advice, and an Arts Law staff member will call you back to take down your query.
Requests for legal advice are answered in the order that they are first received; priority is not given to messages left on our telephone system. Arts Law does not accept requests for legal advice by post or direct email.
Types of legal advice
Arts Law will deal with your enquiry by providing either telephone legal advice or a document review depending on whether giving you legal advice involves reviewing any documentation.
1. Telephone legal advice (TLA)
If your enquiry does not involve the review of any document, an Arts Law lawyer will contact you by telephone and give you legal advice based on the instructions you have provided Arts Law administrative staff at the time you made your request for legal advice, as well as any additional information you might provide the lawyer. Advice for one session is valued at approximately $500. The turn around time to receive advice from a lawyer for a TLA is approx 7-10 days.
The telephone legal advice service is subject to Arts Law’s Legal advice guidelines as well as other policies which will be explained to you upon contacting Arts Law.
2. Document review (DRS)
If your enquiry involves the review of any document related to your matter, for example a formal contract or an exchange of correspondence, Arts Law recommends the use of its document review service. This service is only available to our subscribers.
Under this service, you send any document which you want explained to you to Arts Law. An Arts Law lawyer (in-house or external volunteer lawyer or law firm acting on behalf of Arts Law) then reviews the document and holds a review consultation with you to explain the document and provide you legal advice in relation to that document. This service requires a subscription which entitles clients to have 2 Document Review (DRS) sessions and 5 Telephone Legal Advice (TLA) sessions - valued at over $4200. The turn around time to receive advice from a lawyer for a DRS is approx 10-14 days.
The document review service is subject to Arts Law’s Legal advice guidelines as well as other policies which will be explained to you upon contacting Arts Law.
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Limits to Arts Law’s legal advice services
In some circumstances, Arts Law is unable to provide assistance even if you are generally eligible for its services. For example, we will not advise you if another party in your dispute or transaction has already contacted us for advice; or if we consider it more appropriate for your matter to be referred elsewhere. Further, Arts Law can only advise on arts-related matters.
In accordance with its mission, Arts Law operates under an 'artist first' policy. As a result, we cannot unconditionally provide legal advice to organisations if doing so would later preclude us from advising the artist. In such situations we may, at our discretion, provide best practice advice under our Best practice guidelines.