Maddocks

Employment, Safety and People

Partner

Catherine is one of Australia’s leading lawyers in the areas of WH&S (Work Health & Safety) and inquiries. She practices in WH&S and employment in both the Melbourne and Canberra offices. She leads the safety team at Maddocks and works with clients on all aspects of safety work from training, policy review, bullying investigations and crisis preparation to incident response and representation during investigations and prosecutions.  She has acted for private and public sector clients in relation to a wide range of work related incidents involving serious injuries and fatalities.

Catherine acts for clients in employment-related matters including bullying, discrimination, harassment, misconduct, whistleblower investigations, breaches of codes of conduct, managing ill and injured employees and terminations.

Catherine is one of Australia’s most experienced lawyers in coronial inquiries and inquests.  She led a large team acting for the for the Country Fire Authority (CFA) in the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission.  She has also acted for clients in other Royal Commissions, in inquiries into corruption and improper conduct, in internal government inquiries and in coronial inquests involving industrial deaths, emergency incidents, drownings, sporting incidents, police shootings, rail crashes, building collapses and deaths of those in care.

Catherine’s background in administrative law means she brings a broad knowledge of administrative law and statutory interpretation, privacy law, to her public sector clients. With extensive experience in providing urgent incident response advice in high profile matters, Catherine helps both public and private sector clients in dealing with police and other investigative authorities, and working with media and reputation advisers.

Catherine is renowned as a trainer and provides in-house training for a wide range of private and public sector clients on safety, addressing bullying and discrimination, legal compliance, public law, employment law and legal crisis management.

Australian Human Resources Institute

Australian Institute of Administrative Law

Australian Institute of Company Directors

International Association on Workplace Bullying and Harassment

Institute of Public Administration

Law Institute of Victoria

National Safety Council of Australia

Safety Institute of Australia

BEc, LLB, Monash University

LLM Public and International Law, University of Melbourne

Graduate Diploma in Employment and Labour Relations Law, University of Melbourne