About Louise
Louise Greentree BA, LLB (Syd), LLM(Hons)(UTS), ProfCertArb (Adel).
Admitted as a solicitor of the Supreme Court of NSW and the High Court of Australia
After 21 years in private practice as a solicitor (including 17 years as a partner of a Sydney City firm of solicitors) Louise joined the New South Wales College of Law teaching staff in the Litigation stream. While there, she designed, wrote and presented a national training course for representatives of children in Family Court proceedings, and a ‘train the trainers’ course for Judges and Registrars of the Family Court, child experts and senior family lawyers.
Louise moved to the University of Technology Sydney as a foundation member of the Practical Legal Training (PLT) program teaching team. Over the years, she has taught in most areas of that program, as well as designing and coordinating the Stage 2 Professional and Advanced skills training program and subjects Advocacy, Legal Skills and Professional Awareness and Legal Accounting (Professional Conduct 1). Louise has developed two areas of particular concentration in her teaching and course development: the first is the area of conflict resolution, including the developments in transformative lawyer roles in the resolution of conflict. She has designed subjects which she now teaches in the conflict resolution stream of the Faculty’s postgraduate law program. The second is the area of Legal Professional ethics, and this is now also informing her research in the area of international developments in the role of the lawyer.
Louise’s research interests have developed in the several areas of conflict resolution with a particular focus on transformative mediation processes, including narrative and insight mediation; collaborative practice; restorative practices; the application of family systems theory in organisational conflict, particularly in faith-based organisations; and conflict resolution systems design.
Louise no longer practices as a solicitor. Instead she is applying her legal and conflict resolution training, and the outcomes of her research interests to a developing consultancy on intervention processes for the resolution of Christian church (parish) conflicts.
Louise has trained as a mediator and arbitrator and as a facilitator of restorative conferences. She is also undertaking part-time studies at the Eastern Mennonite University, Virginia USA in Conflict Transformation.
Her vision for faith-based organisations like the Anglican Church in Australia is that they will look to the strong international developments in transformative conflict resolution and the developments in transformative, not merely adversarial, roles of lawyers to provide processes that honour truth, justice, and the Christian values of the organisation. She is disturbed by present developments she has observed which are demonstrating a hard-line attitude to conflict resolution, involving processes that do not honour the human condition, ignore values (other than self-righteous and judgmental values), and which inflict harm on all who are involved in the processes.
Contact Louise at louise@churchdispute.com to tell her about your experiences with Christian church complaints processes.