Our Vision and Values

Our Vision

• We provide legal assistance and representation for people in Townsville and Queensland.
• We provide assistance and representation for: Family Law, Compensation/Personal Injuries Law, and Wills and Estates Law.
• We are passionate about providing affordable quality legal services.
• We treat clients with respect and always give excellent service.
• We understand our clients legal needs and walk with them to excellent legal outcomes.
• We strive to give personal service, to be compassionate, and for our clients to feel they come under our protection.
• Is to be good stewards so we can be generous.

Our Values

Our values include:

• respect and kindness 
• commitment to excellent outcomes 
• collaboration and teamwork
• adaptability and flexibility.

Clients

We care about our clients and treat them with respect, kindness and compassion. 

Our clients often seek out a lawyer at a time when life is changing. We assist and represent people with legal issues when family relationships change; if their life has been turned upside down by an accident or injury (psychological or physical); or when there has been a death in the family and an estate needs to be administered.  We understand that change can be stressful. We strive to be compassionate and understanding.

Our role is to provide quality, affordable legal services. We are committed to doing all we can so our clients feel understood. We want our clients to feel that they come under our protection. We want our clients to be satisfied with their outcomes and to experience excellent care, service and results.

We will always be professional and give the very best of our experience, knowledge and skills regardless of the difficulty or challenge.

We promise to do our very best to…

• be respectful, clear and professional at all times.
• always treat you with care and courtesy.
• use a polite manner, regardless of how we feel or how others are behaving.
• be optimistic and realistic.
• understand your situation and make sure you feel understood; and be non-judgmental, give perspective, understand the details and see the bigger picture.
• show empathy and compassion.
• find solutions that are realistic and advantageous to you.
• give clear explanations, allow you to feel justified, and recognise and acknowledge your situation.
• communicate what the law is and recognise that while it might not be the most serious of legal issues, it is important to you and that is why you have come to see us.
• proactively, sensibly and sensitively manage our communication with you and everyone we are helping, in order to be cost effective and efficient for you.
• see you promptly at appointment times and try not to keep you waiting.
• set aside enough time in appointments to be empathetic, obtain relevant information for your matter and to advise you.
• give you realistic advice so you can have realistic expectations about how your matter is likely to resolve.
• provide cost effective solutions by being proactive in resolving your matter as soon as possible.
• use all available methods of dispute resolution to bring matters to their earliest resolution.
• work with you and be strategic in your matter, all the while taking the ‘whole picture’ into account in order to advise you well.
• discuss fees and payment with you at the outset and throughout your matter and be very clear about costs and payment terms.
• give you an accurate estimate of the likely costs of your matter early on and regular updates of actual costs incurred at various stages of your matter.
• be transparent and set good boundaries where necessary.

Communication

When you Call

Our lawyers represent many clients. They have well managed calendars and have set times for appointments, phone calls, reading, thinking, drafting, attending court, mediations, and meeting deadlines. When they are focused on your matter, they give it their full attention and need uninterrupted time. This ensures our clients obtain the best results possible and obtain excellent value for money. 

Lawyers, like doctors or dentists in a busy practice,  have every minute of their day scheduled. Our lawyers are constantly prioritising matters across all of their files. We need our clients to understand our lawyers are usually not available when they call to tell them something, however, you will always get to speak with a paralegal in their team. You can leave a message or make a time for a phone appointment or an appointment at the office. If the issue is urgent our paralegals will let your lawyer know.  

If your lawyer calls you, it will mean something important has come up and they need to talk to you as soon as possible.

Emails

While sending an email is quick, we treat emails as letters and will take time to digest the contents, consider it's urgency, consider our response and write our response. We receive dozens of emails each day, and like receiving letters, it is physically impossible to respond in an hour, or on the same day, or even that week. We will respond to your email as soon as we can though, and very quickly if we think it needs urgent attention.

Team

 At O’Shea and Dyer we know a great team can do so much more than any individual.

We value having a team of individuals who trust each other; who can problem solve openly and honestly; who are all interested in serving people well. We know each other’s strengths and weaknesses and respect each other.  We listen to each other and are able to have healthy, respectful conflict and debate around ideas as we problem solve for our clients. We seek clarity and understand the decisions that are made by/for the team. We commit to decisions and plans of action that improve our service and we are accountable to each other in all aspects of 'office life'.  We work as a team to get things done for our clients.

Community

We love Townsville. We love Queensland. The sunshine is endless. There are so many things to do and see. We support The Townsville Choral Society, NQOMT and the Townsville Eisteddford. We are aware there are people in Townsville that need a hand at times. We try to steward our resources well so we can give a hand. We have supported charities and not-for-profit organisations over the years, like YWAM Townsville, Share the Dignity, Food Relief NQ and The Smith Family. We currently support the Cootharinga Society and Fuel for Schools.

Our Vision for the Future

We are committed to our clients having personal and compassionate service from highly competent, experienced lawyers. Our lawyers are experienced in either Family Law, Personal Injuries/Compensation Law, or Wills and Estates.

We started forty years ago as a 'generalist legal practice' where lawyers did all types of work. Over the past decade, we have expanded and streamlined into a law firm that provides specialist legal representation in three particular areas of law.  Our cleints are represented by experienced lawyers and paralegals who only work in that feild.

As a business, we are highly adaptable and respond quickly to changes in technology and the law. We are constantly refining our processes and systems and actively look for great ideas to enhance the provison of legal services for our cleints.

We are welcoming new Directors and Shareholders to OSheaDyer in the coming years, whilst continuting our commitment to providing quality affordable legal services to people in Queensland.

Our History

Our older clients will remember our original location in Northtown on the Mall. We’ve been at our ‘new’ location in Flinders Street East since the year 2000. You can find us here at Level 1, 225-229 Flinders Street East.

Pat O’Shea and Mark Dyer formed O'Shea & Dyer Solicitors over 40 years ago, back in 1983. Pat and Mark worked with many people in the Townsville community, providing them with quality, affordable, legal services for many years. Pat O’Shea retired in 2008 after 25 years, and Mark Dyer in 2014, after nearly 30 years. Pat and Mark are fondly remembered by many of our clients. 

Ivan Baxter studied law in Brisbane at the University of Queensland. Pat O’Shea gave Ivan his very first job as an Articled Law Clerk in 1989. Pat and Mark were great teachers of the practice of law and how to treat people well. Ivan was admitted as a solicitor in 1991, became a partner in 1994, and the sole Director and leader of the buisness in 2013 when he bought and incorporated the business as O'Shea & Dyer Solicitors Pty Ltd. Jodi Dingwall, our Senior Associate and Family lawyer, joined Ivan as a shareholder in 2022.

We are proud to say that for over forty years, OShea & Dyer Solicitors has provided quality and affordable legal services to people in Townsville and North Queensland and that we have people in our team, like paralegals Shelleigh Naessens and Robyn Mullins who have been with us for more than 25 years.