Peer Legal’s latest Alert summarises Victoria’s rent relief scheme for commercial leases and provides guidance on the steps for landlords and tenants to take in negotiating.  

In the rush to get employees working from home during Covid-19, employers may not have properly considered some of the legal ramifications.  In particular, where employers have directed employees to work from home, they still have a duty of care to ensure that the “working environment” is safe and without risks to health.  In this latest Peer Legal Alert, we discuss some of the OH&S laws and set out some practical tips for employers to consider. 

Peter Moran and Katerina Pshenichner were proud to advise Australian blinds manufacturer, DIY Blinds, with formalizing its Internet of Things (IoT) collaboration with Buddy Technologies Limited, the publicly listed world leader in Wi-Fi connected smart lights.
 
The collaboration, which was announced recently to the ASX, will see both companies working towards deploying LCM series smart modules and firmware for motorized blinds destined for the Australian and US markets.
 
DIY Blinds and LIFX are both homegrown businesses that are capitalizing on the exploding “smart-home” IoT market, led by the likes of Apple HomePod and Google Home.

The team at Peer Legal is very excited to welcome PPSA guru, Linda Widdup, to the firm.  In addition to her specialized knowledge of the Australian, Canadian and New Zealand Personal Properties Security Regimes regimes, Linda has more general expertise in the area of commercial finance and other debtor/creditor matters.

Peer Legal is excited to announce that Stephen Spargo is joining the Peer Legal team as Special Counsel.  Stephen substantially expands the depth and capacity of Peer Legal's commercial team with over 40 years professional experience, including at one of Australia's largest national firms where he was a partner for 32 years.  We are very pleased to have a lawyer of Stephen's caliber joining Peer Legal: his expertise and insight will be of great value to clients and team-members alike.

Peer Legal’s Peter Moran was a panelist last week at a Symposium on NewLaw held as part of RMIT’s Entrepreneurship Week.  Together with fellow panelists Liz Harris of Innovim, Demetrio Zeno of LawSquared and RMIT law lecturer, Aaron Lane, the topics were wide ranging but all dealt with how some law firms, particularly smaller and boutique firms, are moving away from more traditional notions of delivering legal services. 
 
At the forefront was how NewLaw firms are becoming much more client focused and discarding the notion of time as the sole metric of valuing a lawyer’s output.  Peer Legal is already leading the way, in this regards, with its Aligned Pricing approach that prioritises an alignment between pricing for the outcomes delivered to clients and the value to the client in achieving those outcomes.