Swinburne Law School

Our strategy for research and teaching is informed by industry. The Law School has an Advisory Board and each degree or course has a Course Advisory Committee comprising of industry experts to inform curriculum development.

External Law Advisory Committee

Chair

Mitzi Gilligan

Mitzi Gilligan holds a BSc/LLB (Hons) from Monash University, an LLM from the University of Cambridge and an LLM (Intellectual Property) from Monash University. She has been practising as a commercial and regulatory lawyer since 1990, including in the United Kingdom from 1993 to 1997.

She was a partner of Minter Ellison from 2000 until she left in February 2014 to become one of the founding principles of Hive Legal. She served on the Melbourne High School Council from 2009 to 2013 and has been on the board of Justice Connect (formerly PILCH) since 2006 and as chair since December 2010.

External members

Julian Burnside AO QC

The Honourable Julian Burnside OA QC practises principally in commercial litigation, trade practices and administrative law. While maintaining a strong commercial practice, Julian has also developed a distinguished public law practice. His landmark cases include successfully appearing for the plaintiff in Trevorrow v. South Australia which was the first case in which a court recognised membership of the Stolen Generation as a basis for legal compensation.

In recent years Julian has become one of Australia's leading advocates in relation to Australia's treatment of asylum seekers and the protection of human rights. He is also an accomplished author. An early and ongoing user of technology in law, Julian is a founding member of the Victorian Society for Computers and Law. 

Rodney DeBoos 

Rodney DeBoos is a consultant to Davies Collison Cave Law and Davies Collison Cave Patent and Trade Mark Attorneys, having previously been a partner of the firm for over 20 years. He practises mainly in the area of commercialisation of intellectual property and for a number of years lectured on that topic in the Graduate Diploma in Intellectual Property program at the University of Melbourne. 

Terry Healy 

Since 2005 as Special Counsel to CSIRO, Terry Healy has managed CSIRO’s highly successful patent litigation and licensing initiative based on an invention relating to wifi made by CSIRO scientists in 1992–3. The litigation, centred mainly in the Eastern District of Texas in the United States, has led to licences and settlement agreements worth more than $450 million.  

Before that, Terry was CSIRO’s General Counsel for about two decades, in which role he concentrated mainly on corporate governance and litigation. He is admitted to legal practice in Victoria, New South Wales, the ACT and before the High Court of Australia; he is also a Registered Patent Attorney in Australia.  

In his 40-plus-year career with CSIRO, Terry has been involved in a wide variety of legal and policy areas, including through extended secondments to the Parliamentary Office of a Federal Minister for Science, the Independent Inquiry into CSIRO (1978), Shell (Australia), CRA (now Rio Tinto), Freehills and Griffith Hack. 

Frank Vincent AO QC 

The Honourable Frank Vincent AO QC is a distinguished retired judge of the Victorian Supreme Court and former Chancellor of Victoria University. In his legal career his focus was on criminal law, appearing in approximately 200 murder trials, a record number. 

Vincent also worked with several Aboriginal legal aid services, particularly during the years 1975 to 1985 when he spent a substantial part of each year in the Northern Territory working with the Aboriginal community. Vincent was appointed a Judge of the Supreme Court of Victoria in 1985 and had been a Judge of the Court of Appeal for nine years at the time of his retirement in 2009. He was Deputy Chair and then Chair of the Victorian Adult Parole Board, a position he occupied for 17 years. 

Vincent has served as a member of the Victorian Law Reform Commission, consultant to the Australian Law Reform Commission and Chairman of the Victorian Criminal Bar Association, and since his retirement has been appointed by successive Attorneys General to conduct a number of inquiries into matters of public importance. 

Irene Zeitler 

Irene Zeitler holds an LLB (Hons)/BA (Hons) from the University of Melbourne, an LLM from Monash University, and a postgraduate master degree in German Law from Ludwig Maximilians Universität in Germany. She was a partner at Herbert Smith Freehills from 1987 to 2012 where she specialised in intellectual property and technology. Irene is a graduate of Australian Institute of Company Directors and was a member of the Intellectual Property Sub-Committee of the Law Council of Australia from 1990 to 2012. 

William Lye OAM QC 

William Lye OAM BSc (Computers), LLM (Mon), M Ent Inn (AGSE) is a Senior Counsel at the Victorian Bar providing legal services as an arbitrator, barrister and mediator. He practises in commercial and corporate law; intellectual property law; technology, computer and internet-related matters; cross border disputes; and commercial arbitration. 

William is also an accredited mediator and an appointed arbitrator on the Foreign Arbitrator’s Panel of the Shanghai International Arbitration Centre. William serves as a director on the national board of the Order of Australian Association (OAA) Ltd and as a committee member of the OAA Victoria Branch. He is one of the founding members of the Asian Australian Lawyers Association (AALA) and has served as AALA’s national Vice President. He is currently a committee member of the AALA Victoria Branch. 

Mick Sheehy 

Mick Sheehy has been a PriceWaterhouseCoopers partner since October 2018, responsible for building and running PwC’s Australian NewLaw practice which is focused on providing strategic consulting, technology and outsourcing solutions to legal departments. 

Mick is a recognised international leader in the field of legal innovation and transformation, having won numerous international legal innovation awards and with his work the subject of a case study for Harvard Law School. Mick founded and chaired the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium Australia, an industry body established to share best-practice legal operations and innovation knowledge. 

Sara Dennis

Sara Dennis recently took up a positon as an Investment Manager – Commercial (lawyer) at Augusta Ventures (Australia) Pty Ltd (litigation funder). Previously and since 2003, Sara worked at Clayton Utz as Senior Legal Project Manager and Special Counsel in the Commercial Litigation group where her primary area of practice was defending class actions for large corporate entities. In addition, Sara advised companies in relation to product safety issues and the implementation of product recalls, and represented clients in coronial inquests.