Madeleine is a Senior Associate in our Workplace Team.
Madeleine is a workplace relations lawyer with a strong understanding of employment and industrial relations law. She is skilled in providing advice and representation to private and public sector clients on all employment and industrial relations matters.
Experience & expertise
Madeleine has extensive experience advising private and public sector clients in various industries including health, hospitality, local and federal government in employment and industrial disputes. She regularly appears in federal courts and tribunals in workplace disputes such as unfair dismissal and general protection claims, discrimination claims and disputes regarding the interpretation of enterprise agreements. In litigious matters, she is skilled at developing litigation strategy and obtaining positive outcomes for clients.
Madeleine understands the impact that workplace issues and disputes can have on an organisation’s productivity, culture and reputation, and the importance of resolving these issues in a timely and efficient way. She provides tailored advice to support her client’s strategic interests.
Madeleine regularly provides pragmatic and commercially sound advice to clients, regarding employment, industrial and work health and safety law matters. She has speciality providing legal services to clients in the health sector and public sector, particularly in enterprise bargaining negotiations.
Work highlights
Madeleine’s major matters include:
- Obtaining a successful outcome in the development of an enterprise bargaining agreement for the Australian Taxation Office (ATO), a large federal government agency with over 20,000 employees. This involved centralised APS-wide negotiations and drafting both the APS common conditions and the ATO’s agency-specific conditions
- Leading and managing a classification review for an international company, involving the assessment of more than 200 position descriptions across four related entities and advice on the correct classifications under the relevant modern awards and enterprise agreements
- Representing clients across various sectors, including health, hospitality and local government in general protections claims and unfair dismissal claims at the Fair Work Commission
- Leading and managing a workplace investigation for a local government client regarding alleged sexual harassment and provided recommendations
- Advising a multinational company on the application of the Fair Work Act for an overseas employee and associated implications
- Successfully representing the ATO in a stop bullying order application before the Fair Work Commission
- Leading enterprise bargaining negotiations for a new enterprise agreement for a health sector client after it acquired multiple entities with a mix of enterprise agreement and modern award coverage
- Advising a state government authority on a large-scale payroll remediation project addressing historical underpayments, including interpreting and applying multiple enterprise agreements over a six-year period
- Advising a private school on whether an individual characterised as an independent contractor was an employee for the purposes of the Fair Work Act and superannuation legislation as well as associated implications.
Professional background
