Positive Duty Training for Law Firms: What You Need to Do!

March 30, 2026

Since December 2022, Australian employers have had a positive duty under the Sex Discrimination Act to take reasonable and proportionate measures to eliminate workplace sexual harassment, sex discrimination, and related conduct — before it occurs. In December 2023, the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) was granted formal powers to investigate and enforce that duty without waiting for an individual complaint. For law firms, that shift is significant.

Most firms have done something. A policy on the intranet. An awareness session during an all-hands. A partner presentation at the start of the year. But an awareness session is not training. And a policy no one can find is not evidence of compliance.

The gap between ‘we’ve done something’ and ‘we can demonstrate we’ve done what’s required’ is where most firms are exposed. This article covers what the positive duty actually requires, what training needs to look like in a law firm context, and how to build an approach that’s defensible — not just ticked.

Positive Duty Training for Law Firms: What You Need to Do!

TL;DR: Positive Duty Training for Law Firms

Since December 2022, Australian law firms have a legal obligation to prevent workplace sexual harassment, not just respond to it. The AHRC can now enforce that duty without waiting for a complaint. Most firms have a policy and maybe an awareness session. That’s not enough. Compliant training covers all seven AHRC standards, is role-specific (partners need different content to general staff), happens more than once, and produces verifiable completion records. If your firm can’t pull a training report by name and date within minutes, that’s a strong signal your current approach may fall short of what the AHRC expects to see.

What Is the Positive Duty Under the Sex Discrimination Act?

The positive duty is a legal obligation on all Australian employers to take active, proactive steps to prevent workplace sexual harassment, sex-based discrimination, hostile work environments, and victimisation. It is set out in section 47C of the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth). The AHRC’s powers to enforce the duty — including inquiring into compliance and issuing compliance notices — are conferred separately, under Division 4A of Part II of the Australian Human Rights Commission Act 1986 (Cth).

The obligation is not reactive. It does not wait for a complaint. Employers are required to act before harm occurs — not just respond when it does.

When did it come into effect?

The positive duty obligations came into force on 12 December 2022, following the passage of the Anti-Discrimination and Human Rights Legislation Amendment (Respect at Work) Act 2022. The AHRC’s formal enforcement powers took effect on 12 December 2023 — meaning the Commission can now assess compliance, issue compliance notices, and seek court-enforceable orders without relying on an individual to lodge a complaint.

What does it require employers to do?

The AHRC has published detailed Guidelines for Complying with the Positive Duty, which outline seven standards employers must work toward. Training directly addresses at least three of those standards — but all seven are relevant to how firms structure their approach.

See the full table of standards and their training implications below.

Standard	What it means for training in your firm
1. Leadership	Senior leaders and partners must visibly model respectful behaviour and take active responsibility for the firm’s culture — not just sign off on a policy.
2. Culture	Firms must assess and address the cultural conditions that allow harassment or discrimination to occur, including power dynamics and hierarchy.
3. Knowledge and capability	All staff must receive training on their rights and responsibilities. Leaders need additional training on their obligations as people managers.
4. Risk management	Firms must identify the specific risks in their environment — including client-facing work, after-hours events, and hierarchical pressure — and address them directly.
5. Support	Clear, visible reporting pathways must exist, and staff must know how to use them without fear of disadvantage.
6. Reporting and accountability	Firms need systems to track incidents and near-misses, and leaders must be held accountable for outcomes — not just process.
7. Monitoring and evaluation	Training and interventions must be measured for effectiveness. Completion rates alone are not enough.

The AHRC Guidelines are available in full at the Australian Human Rights Commission website.

Why Law Firms Face Particular Pressure Under Positive Duty

Law firms are not generic workplaces. They are hierarchical, high-pressure environments where seniority carries real power — over workloads, career progression, client relationships, and referrals. Clerks, graduates, and junior associates often depend on senior lawyers for opportunities they cannot get anywhere else. That dependency creates conditions where reporting feels risky.

The legal profession has faced specific scrutiny for exactly this reason. Industry-specific research — including the International Bar Association’s global survey of legal workplaces and reviews of the Victorian and South Australian legal professions — has found that sexual harassment occurs in the legal sector at higher rates than many other industries, with power imbalances between senior and junior staff a recurring factor. Since gaining its enforcement powers, the AHRC has opened formal compliance inquiries in the Retail Trade, Accommodation & Food Services, Finance, and Transport, Postal & Warehousing sectors — professional services, including law firms, have not yet been named as a focus area.

Law firms also operate in high-intensity social contexts — client dinners, after-hours drinks, firm events — where informal conduct that would be unacceptable in an office is sometimes normalised. The positive duty covers those environments too.

State WHS laws reinforce the federal obligation further. The model Work Health and Safety laws — adopted by most states and territories — require employers to manage the risk of psychological harm, including that arising from harassment and discrimination. Victoria has not adopted the model WHS laws; equivalent psychosocial obligations there sit under the Occupational Health and Safety Act 2004 (Vic). Firms operating across multiple states are subject to both the federal positive duty and whichever state-based work health and safety framework applies in each jurisdiction.

The question is not whether law firms are at risk under the positive duty. The question is whether their current training approach is defensible if the AHRC asks for evidence.

What the AHRC’s Seven Standards Actually Mean for Training

The AHRC’s seven standards are not a checklist to file away. They describe what a genuinely compliant workplace looks like in practice. Three of those standards are directly tied to training — and they set a higher bar than most firms currently meet.

Standard 1: Leadership

Partners and senior leaders cannot treat positive duty as an HR matter. The AHRC’s Guidelines make clear that leadership requires active and visible commitment — which means leaders must understand what they are committing to. That means training specifically designed for partners: covering their obligations as people managers, how to respond when issues are raised, and the specific risks created by their level of authority in the firm.

A blanket all-staff module does not satisfy this standard. Leadership training must be distinct.

Standard 3: Knowledge and Capability

This is the standard most directly connected to staff training. Every person in the firm — from clerks to partners — must understand what sexual harassment and sex-based discrimination look like, what behaviours are prohibited, how to respond if they experience or witness them, and what the firm’s reporting pathways are.

The AHRC expects training to be more than definitional. It should include scenario-based content that reflects the actual conditions of the workplace — including client-facing interactions, social events, and online communication. Generic eLearning modules with stock photos of fictional offices will not cut it.

Standard 7: Monitoring, Evaluation and Transparency

This is where most firms’ training approaches fail completely. Running a session is not the same as demonstrating it happened. The AHRC expects firms to be able to show who received training, when, and whether it covered the required content.

If your firm cannot produce a training record by name, date, and module within a few minutes, that’s a strong sign your current systems may not meet the AHRC’s evidentiary expectations. Spreadsheets, sign-in sheets, and email confirmations are not audit-ready evidence systems.

What ‘Reasonable and Proportionate’ Training Looks Like for a Law Firm

The positive duty does not prescribe a fixed number of training hours or a specific format. Instead, the AHRC uses the standard of ‘reasonable and proportionate measures.’ That standard is assessed against the size of your firm, the nature of your work, and the specific risk factors in your environment.

For a law firm of 50 to 500 staff, ‘reasonable and proportionate’ is a meaningfully high bar.

What content must be covered?

At minimum, positive duty training for law firm staff should cover:

The definition of sexual harassment and sex-based discrimination under the Sex Discrimination Act
Examples of prohibited conduct in law firm contexts — including after-hours events, digital communications, and client-facing interactions
The firm’s reporting pathways and what happens when a report is made
Bystander responsibilities — what staff are expected to do if they witness inappropriate behaviour
The consequences of conduct for individuals and the firm

Leadership training should additionally cover:

The positive duty itself and its enforcement implications
How to receive and respond to disclosures
The firm’s obligations when managing a complaint, including the duty not to disadvantage the person who raised it
Cultural risk factors specific to the firm’s structure and client environments

Who needs training — and how often?

Everyone in the firm needs training — partners, associates, graduates, clerks, and support staff. The content and depth differ by role, but there are no exemptions.

A single one-off session is not sufficient. The AHRC’s Guidelines indicate that ongoing capability-building is expected, not a once-and-done module. In practice, that means an initial training module for all new starters, an annual refresh for existing staff, and updated content whenever the law or firm policy changes.

How do you prove the training happened?

This is the question most firms cannot answer quickly — and that gap is a problem.

Proof of training means verifiable records showing who completed what, when, and whether they passed any embedded knowledge checks. Email confirmations, attendance sheets, and manager sign-offs are not sufficient for AHRC purposes. You need a system that tracks completion by individual, records the date and version of training delivered, and generates a report on demand.

For more on building a compliant training record system, see going beyond spreadsheets in training complianceand building a compliance training program.

What 'Reasonable and Proportionate' Training Looks Like for a Law Firm

How Tribal Habits Helps Law Firms Meet Positive Duty Obligations

When law firms look at their current training setup against the AHRC’s standards, a few things become clear quickly: generic content doesn’t reflect their environment, completion tracking is manual or non-existent, and partner-specific training has never been built.

Here is what good looks like in a training platform for this context — and how some Australian law firms are solving it.

Build training that reflects your firm, not a stock scenario library

The AHRC expects scenario-based training drawn from real workplace conditions. That is very difficult to achieve with off-the-shelf content built for a generic workforce.

Tribal Habits is an LMS with a built-in authoring tool. Your firm’s HR team or senior practitioners can build positive duty training using your own policies, your own language, and scenarios from your actual work environment — without commissioning an external consultant or waiting months for a developer. The platform supports over 50 interaction types and guided content creation, so people who know the firm’s culture can put that knowledge directly into the training.

This is how compliance training for Australian law firms works in practice — the firm owns the content, can update it when legislation or firm policy changes, and does not need to go back to a vendor every time.

Track completion in a way that holds up under scrutiny

Tribal Habits records training completion by individual, with timestamps and version tracking. Managers see a real-time dashboard showing who has completed what — and who hasn’t. Automated reminders go out to people approaching renewal dates. If the AHRC asks for training records, you can produce them in minutes, not days.

See also: LMS for compliance training.

Deliver different training to different roles — without building separate systems

The AHRC is clear that partners require more than general staff training. Tribal Habits supports role-based learning paths, so partners, associates, graduates, and support staff each receive content matched to their responsibilities. One platform. Clear separation of content by audience. No manual routing.

Law firms, including Carroll & O’Dea Lawyers, Thomson Greer, and Coleman Greig, use Tribal Habits to manage training across their teams. The platform is built for professional services environments where compliance is not optional, and records matter.

See how Tribal Habits helps law firms build training that their teams actually complete — and records they can stand behind. Book a free demo.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is positive duty training mandatory for all Australian law firms?

Yes. The positive duty under the Sex Discrimination Act applies to all Australian employers, regardless of size or industry. Law firms are not exempt. The AHRC has enforcement powers and can assess any firm for compliance, without an individual complaint being lodged. Firms that cannot demonstrate reasonable and proportionate preventative measures face the risk of compliance notices and court-enforceable orders.

What happens if a law firm doesn’t comply with the positive duty?

The AHRC can conduct compliance assessments, issue compliance notices, and seek enforceable undertakings or orders through the Federal Court. Beyond formal enforcement, firms that fail to comply also carry significantly elevated legal risk when individual complaints are made — because the absence of a structured prevention system makes it much harder to defend the firm’s actions. Reputational exposure in the legal market is also a real consideration.

How often should positive duty training be delivered?

There is no legislated minimum frequency. The AHRC standard is ‘reasonable and proportionate,’ which in practice means initial training for all new starters, an annual refresh for existing staff, and updated training whenever the law or firm policy changes materially. A single one-off session — even a thorough one — is unlikely to satisfy the ongoing capability-building standard the AHRC expects to see.

Can we use our existing policies as the basis for training content?

Policies are a starting point, but they are not training. A policy document tells people what the rules are. Training builds the knowledge, understanding, and skill to apply those rules in real situations. Effective positive duty training goes beyond policy recitation — it includes scenario-based content, practical examples drawn from the firm’s actual environment, and mechanisms to check that people understood what they learned.

Does senior leadership need separate training from the general staff?

Yes. The AHRC’s Guidelines are explicit on this point. Leadership has a different role and different obligations — including how they model behaviour, how they respond to disclosures, and how they manage the firm’s culture. General all-staff training does not cover these responsibilities adequately. Partners and senior leaders need a dedicated module that addresses their specific accountability under the positive duty.

This information is general in nature and doesn’t constitute legal or compliance advice. Requirements vary by state, sector and organisation, so we’d always recommend checking with your regulator or professional adviser before relying on it.

The Line Between Ticked and Defensible

Most law firms have done something on a positive duty. The question is whether what they’ve done would hold up if the AHRC came asking.

An awareness session is not a training system. A policy document is not evidence of capability. And a sign-in sheet from a lunch briefing is not a compliance record.

The positive duty requires firms to take reasonable and proportionate steps to prevent harm — and to be able to prove they did. That means structured training by role, verifiable completion records, and a system that doesn’t collapse when someone needs to find proof of who completed what last year.

Firms that build that system now are in a much better position — not just for regulatory compliance, but for the culture they’re trying to build. Training that reflects your firm’s real environment, delivered to the right people, tracked properly, is how you move from exposure to confidence.