Need advice on legal issues affecting the University? The team of lawyers and support staff at the Office of General Counsel (OGC) can help.

The team have recently created a set of standard templates for documents such as non-disclosure agreements, which are available on their recently refreshed website.

Who are you?
The Office of General Counsel. We are a team of lawyers and support staff, led by Carol Kirby.

What do you do?
Our role is to provide advice on the legal issues affecting the University.

Our work involves consideration of many different areas of the law, such as intellectual property, contracts, real property, IT, health, privacy, administrative law and the laws / regulations that govern the operations of the higher education sector.

Our function is to help University staff to make decisions knowing the legal implications of whatever they are dealing with.

Why do you do it?
We love being part of a community that promotes innovation, research and education and clever clients committed to the greater good. To play a small role in that is something most lawyers would be proud of!

Any frequent misunderstandings or misconceptions about what your team does?
We don’t provide advice to students, or personal advice to staff of the University.

We only give advice on legal matters – our clients make the decisions.

What’s a recent achievement you’re proud of?
The team is always working on something interesting! A few recent things we are proud of:

• Working with the Research Services team to put the agreements in place for the ARC Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology.
• Being part of the Macquarie University Diversity and Inclusion Committee.
• pProviding legal input and assistance for the acquisition of Macquarie Medical Imaging and its transition into MQ Health (Macquarie University Hospital).
• Drafting contracts and providing legal advice for the acquisition and implementation of the new Contracts Management System

What’s planned for the future – anything exciting on the horizon?
Perhaps not exciting to non-lawyers, however we are working to make our standard agreements and templates interactive so staff of the University can very easily create a document.

We are also keeping up to date on the Covid-19 legislation, codes and regulations being put in place and how they affect the operations of the University and its controlled entities – this has kept us on our toes!

How do you engage with us? Where can we learn more?
We have refreshed our site, so please visit us at Office of General Counsel to see how we can best help you.

You can also take a look at our briefing chart, to see if your query can be better answered by a different department.

Otherwise, you can complete the instruction sheet and send an email to legalservices@mq.edu.au.