The young lawyers thrust onto the frontline of the domestic violence crisis

The hours are long, the pay is not great, and the work can veer from "confronting" to "overwhelming".

At just 26 years old, community lawyer Biftu Reggasa Tulu is an unlikely face on the frontline of Australia's domestic and family violence crisis.

She can't see herself doing anything else.

"It's challenging. People come here with multiple vulnerabilities and some of the things they disclose to you [are] not easy," said the Geelong-based lawyer, whose work covers surrounding regional communities.

"But it's highly rewarding. It aligns with my values."

Ms Reggasa Tulu is part of a welcome new cohort of emerging lawyers drafted into regional legal centres to provide badly needed cover for a system experts say is at breaking point.

Amid desperate shortages in services, community legal centres around the country are alarmed at the increasing scale and scope of support they are providing to victim-survivors.

"We cannot keep up with the demand for our services. We could be double the size and probably still not meet the legal need," said Sarah Dahlenburg, principal solicitor of the NSW Mid-North Coast Legal Centre.

"Sometimes we're just plugging the gaps.

"To be honest, we are put much more in crisis management than we should be."

People seeking free legal help for domestic and family violence accounts for around 40 to 50 per cent of the workload of community legal centres nationally, according to the sector's peak body.

In rural, remote and very remote areas, cases are "disproportionately high," with that figure rising to 75 per cent.

Legal centres around the country told the ABC domestic and family violence matters were becoming increasingly complex.

They say victim-survivors are also seeking help for issues relating to housing, financial abuse, mental health and their own interactions with the criminal justice system.

"It is a system that is strained," said Julianna Marshall from the Central Australian Women's Legal Service (CAWLS), which covers a vast expanse of the Northern Territory.

It's rare that a month passes in Australia without serious incidents of domestic and family violence reaching national attention and furthering calls for action.

A federal parliamentary inquiry currently has the grim brief of investigating the relationship between domestic, family and sexual violence and suicide.

Yet for all the multi-partisan commitments to curbing the crisis, those on the ground say the extent of the challenge is still not fully understood.

"Domestic violence services are just absolutely stretched and it's not uncommon for them to be closing their books," said Ms Dahlenburg, whose team covers a stretch of NSW coastline from Forster to just south of Woolgoolga.

"We end up doing inadvertent safety planning, inadvertent financial planning, just because there's no other service to do it."

When Townsville-based Bundjalung women Penney Ferguson interviews prospective lawyers, she now asks if they are claustrophobic or suffer from motion sickness.

The CEO of First Nations Women's Legal Service Queensland often sees staff fly on a cramped small plane to support victim-survivors at the Specialist Domestic Violence Court on Palm Island.

She once found herself with a team of three lawyers who "couldn't handle" making the trip due to the prospect of feeling unwell.

"It's so important for us to be face-to-face," Ms Ferguson said.

"I think every Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander woman, no matter how remote or how far away she is, should have access to knowledge about her own rights."

In the NT, a small team of lawyers from Alice Springs and Tennant Creek conducts outreach across an area more than three times the size of Victoria.

"For us to go out there, it's very expensive, but it's a better economic use of funds for us to travel and see women … [than] for women to travel to see us," said Ms Marshall, the incoming CEO of CAWLS.

In a line of legal work already far from lucrative, Ms Marshall said the rising costs of petrol and flights were also impacting the service's ability to attract staff.

It echoes the sentiment shared by other legal centres in regional and rural areas, which have ongoing difficulties filling vacant positions.

The sector is now advocating for a HECS-HELP forgiveness scheme that would wipe university debts for lawyers who move to regional or remote community legal centres.

The forgiveness scheme was a recommendation of a 2024 independent review of the federal government's National Legal Assistance Partnership (NLAP), which funds community legal centres.

A spokesperson for the Department of Education pointed to a separate independent review of HECS-HELP debt relief programs, which did not recommend expanding debt relief for regional and rural community lawyers.

According to the department spokesperson, that was subject to further review in 2028.

Government funding for community legal centres and women's legal services is set to increase over the 2025–2030 period by 74 per cent.

In the current climate of domestic and family violence, Ms Marshall believed her service could receive "quadruple the funding" and still struggle to meet the current community need.

"Women in remote areas shouldn't be at such a disproportionately higher risk of homicide and lack the services to be able to respond. They deserve that response, and it needs to be funded," she said.

In the south-west of Victoria, around 200 people marched on a late October Saturday in Colac, seeking an end to domestic and family violence.

The regional town is covered by Barwon Community Legal, which recently welcomed Ms Reggasa Tulu and 27-year-old fellow first-year lawyer Divya Vickneswaran into their team.

The two were part of a new initiative from Women's Legal Service Victoria that trains and supports emerging lawyers to take up roles in regional and outer metropolitan communities.

"Both of them are a delight. They work incredibly hard," said Michele Downes, manager of the centre's Family Law and Family Violence team.

"I'm so incredibly proud of the work that they do. They're dedicated to their clients.

Now in its second year, the program has placed eight early-career lawyers around the state with legal centres to help respond to domestic and family violence matters.

There remains a sector-wide problem with attracting and retaining senior practitioners, but Barwon Legal Centre said the two young lawyers had collectively managed around a quarter of their Family Law Team's overall caseload since starting this year.

Ms Vickneswaran grew up in Geelong but always imagined she would have to move to Melbourne to pursue her legal career.

She conceded the work could be stressful to the point of being overwhelming, but she was exactly where she wanted to be.

"We're seeing people at the most difficult times of their lives. I have clients who maybe it's their first time sharing their story," Ms Vickneswaran said.

"The opportunity to give back to my community was a big part of me signing up to this program.

"I thought it was a sign that I'm going in the right direction."