The team at Reign Legal is hoping to help vulnerable community members in need of free family law advice.
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Launching last week to coincide with Domestic and Family Violence Prevention Month, Reign's principal lawyer Melissa Buchanan said the pandemic had seen incidents of family relationship breakdowns increase.
Ms Buchanan hopes her small firm can help support the work by ARC Justice and Loddon Campaspe Cimmunity Legal Centre.
"My staff members have really headed up this initiative," she said. "It really came about around this idea of a lack of services thanks to COVID.
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"The Loddon Campaspe CLC ran a fantastic Wednesday night service clinic. They had to stop doing that clinic just because they are literally inundated with work is what I'm hearing.
"A lot of that is, I think, resulting from significant increases in breakdown in relationships, which we're finding is resulting most commonly from all the stresses surrounding what happened (through the pandemic)."
"We decided to start a clinic that would run and provide services to those who really genuinely need it."
Ms Buchanan said as well as intervention orders, children's issues and property issues, her team wanted to focus on individuals who were suffering forms of family violence.
"It's not only about helping those who were the most in need in our community, but to talk about and educate people around what actually is family violence," she said.
"Family violence is prevalent and it happens in a number of different forms and on a number of different platforms. Some of those less commonly spoken about are the types of family violence that are occurring most regularly and most alarmingly.
"Whilst no one form is more serious than the other, it is often the forms centering around coercion and control which are less recognised and less talked about."
"While this form of violence is not always accompanied by physical violence or threats, it is still extremely damaging, should not be tolerated, and the first step to ensuring those engaging in this type of conduct are properly called out, is to create real conversation."
Data from the Crime Statistics Agency for 2021 showed while family violence incidents dropped across the state, the rate increased by 2.8 percent in the Greater Bendigo region.
A five-year high of 2395 family incidents were reported in 2021.
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"I feel it's a slow progression," she said. "Certainly when you're dealing with acrimonious separations, between individuals, the amount of family violence that you're actually seeing back and forth between the parties is alarming.
"The fact that this is continuing, it makes me think that we're not doing enough to talk about it, and we all need to talk about it more."
The Reign Legal team is holding their free family law clinic once a fortnight.
"There will be three lawyers that are able to provide this one-off advice in 45 minute slots," she said. "Every fortnight that we're doing that service, we will be able to help a minimum of six individuals on that night and we certainly hope that we'll be able to broaden those surfaces.
"We're one of the smaller firms in Bendigo. If every private practice firm could be offering this type of service, I can't imagine how many people would actually be able to help.
"I assume even if you looked at the stats, there'd be a plethora of additional people who are requiring requiring these types of services. So I do hope all of the other practices in turn might see the opportunity to give something back the way that we have."
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