Legal advice

What is legal advice?

When a lawyer gives you help with your specific legal problem, we call this legal advice. Legal advice is different to legal information, which might be more general and is usually provided by a person who knows about the law but is not a lawyer.

Legal Aid NSW provides legal information to anyone with a legal problem in NSW through our legal information and referral service, LawAccess NSW. You can contact LawAccess NSW via web chat or by calling 1300 888 529 between 9am and 5pm, Monday to Friday (excluding public holidays).

We provide free legal advice to eligible people by phone and at lots of locations across NSW.

What to expect at your advice appointment

Our legal advice appointments are free and for an allocated time. A lawyer will listen to you talk about your problem, ask some follow up questions, and help you decide what to do next.

They might be able to provide help with short documents if you do not have a lawyer. They will not be able to help you with longer complex legal documents.

The lawyer will also tell you if we are able to continue helping you with your case. If we are, staff will help you apply for legal aid.

If we are not able to assist you any further after your advice appointment, we may be able to give you information about where you can go for more help.

What we give advice about

Our lawyers can support you with criminal matters involving the police, family matters involving children or a relationship breakdown, or civil matters where you are having trouble with a fundamental need like housing, income support or access to health and disability supports.

Learn more about the advice we can provide at the download below.

Who can get legal advice

We don’t provide legal advice for everyone. Our purpose is to provide legal services to people in NSW experiencing disadvantage, and we have limited resources to achieve this.

How to book an advice appointment

The best way to find out if we can provide you with free legal advice or book an appointment is to speak to our team at LawAccess NSW.

You can contact LawAccess NSW by starting a web chat or calling 1300 888 529 between 9am to 5pm, Monday to Friday (excluding public holidays).

Your privacy

Anything you tell us is confidential. This means we can’t tell anyone what you say or give us (unless you agree).

Sometimes Legal Aid helps more than one person in the same case. We have lots of lawyers. So one of our lawyers may help you, and another Legal Aid lawyer may also help the person you have a dispute with. Or another lawyer may also help someone else who is connected to your case.

If you accept our help, then you agree to the way we treat your confidential information.

You can download our client disclosure statement below, which provides information on how we will keep your information confidential.