Legal Advice and Agreements

Legal Advice

All requests for legal advice must be submitted to the Legal Office using the Legal Assistance Form unless the advice is required urgently (i.e. within 2 days). If you are aware of a University issue requiring urgent advice, please telephone the Legal Office on (02) 6620 3465 or email legal@scu.edu.au.

Agreements

Written contracts/agreements are a valuable tool to document arrangements between the University and third parties. Amongst other things, they are used to:

  • Allocate clear and enforceable responsibilities between the parties;
  • Establish Key Performance Indicators or service levels, that can be used to manage poor performance by a contractual party; and
  • Manage risk to the University.

The Contract Procedures contain certain mandatory steps for staff arranging University contracts and should be read in conjunction with the University's Contract Management Framework. The Procedures apply in addition to any other procedural or approval processes that may be relevant to a particular arrangement (e.g. Outside Work Policy and/or Commercial Activities Procedures).

The Legal Office categorises the agreements/contracts that the University enters into two main types:

  • Standard Agreements, generated by University staff through the HotDocs system. These do not require legal review, as long as none of the existing terms and conditions in the template Standard Agreement are altered. For more information about Standard Agreements, including the identity of the University's "Contract Facilitators", see the Standard Agreements page; and
  • Non-Standard Agreements. These are any agreements other than Standard Agreements. All Non-Standard Agreements require legal review prior to execution by the University. Please see the Review of Non Standard Agreements and Other Legal Advice/Assistance page for more information.

The Legal Office maintains a centrally located register of all of the University's executed agreements. This is best practice for a University, in terms of record-keeping and risk management, but the Legal Office also manages various other registers of contracts that the University is required to keep (for example, the Government Information (Public Access) Act 2009). This means that, after a fully executed agreement is received, the relevant work unit must forward a copy of the agreement to the Legal Office, as well as the original to Corporate Records. For further information about sending executed agreements to the Legal Office and about the ongoing assistance provided by the Legal Office with contract management, please see the Executed Agreements page.