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Onyx Legal

At Onyx Legal, we are a team of dedicated lawyers who have many years of experience as business owners ourselves. As business owners, we get it – you need reliable, affordable, and approachable legal advice that leaves you free to get on with what makes your business successful.

We know our work needs to offer you a return on investment. To do that, we provide advice and legal documents that offer better performance from your customers, suppliers and staff and build trust in your business. We make it easier for people to engage with you online and in-person. We also help to protect you from the ever-growing range of legal threats – from cyber-crime to customer disputes and more. Let’s safeguard your organisation, optimise your legal documents, and make it easier for customers to do business with you.

Onyx Legal began with Principal Lawyer, Jeanette Jifkins, and has scaled to a caring team of lawyers and entrepreneurs to combine the best of both worlds. We provide detailed, goal-oriented legal advice that helps your business to grow. We have worked with over 1000 entrepreneurial clients and have the knowledge and experience needed to help your growing business to succeed.

Jeanette is an entrepreneur and a highly experienced corporate lawyer with strong interests in digital services and privacy law. She’s a leader in her field and takes an active role in shaping the future as a board member or chair of several national and international organisations.

After working in litigation, Jeanette concluded that she’d far rather protect clients against legal action than defend them once they’d become ensnared. Prevention is better than cure, after all.

Jeanette Jifkins

Jeanette has always respected people with the skill to grow things.

Some of her strongest childhood memories are of her father growing produce in their garden. Now she equips clients to grow their businesses, using her legal skills and creativity to build a protective framework and remove barriers to innovation.

Having worked as in-house counsel in a number of businesses, she understands what companies really need from their lawyers and respects their choices about the level of risk they’re willing to carry.

As the owner of several businesses herself, Jeanette’s goal is to make business life easier for clients using her natural enthusiasm, strategic thinking and clear communication style – exemplified in her 2016 book, Cover your arse online: a guide to protecting your online business assets.

A ‘plain English’ approach to law is part of that. Since her earliest days as a law student, Jeanette has worked to demystify the law, turning dense contracts written in ‘legalese’ into much shorter documents that everyone can understand. This makes businesses run more smoothly since suppliers and contractors are happy to sign and start work without delaying for their own legal advice.

Jeanette has a strong belief in literacy as the gateway to opportunity.

As a lawyer, she constantly works with words. At her instigation, Onyx now sponsors three children through The Smith Family.

Mental health is another strong interest. Jeanette is chair of the board of On the Line, a professional social health organisation that provides some of Australia’s most vital and trusted services including MensLine Australia and Suicide Call Back Service.