8.13 Cassandra Lang, QLD Cassandra (Cassie) Lang is a Bundjalung woman and Co-founder and Principal Solicitor at Parallax Legal, Brisbane (QLD). She is the Vice President of the Indigenous Lawyers Association of Queensland and has over fifteen years of specialist legal experience in the native title and cultural heritage areas of law. Cassie has been frustrated and perplexed by what she has seen as a First Nations woman practicing in native title law. Cassie addressed a wide gamut of issues within the native title system during our interview. One such issue was professionals in the system failing to ensure clients are able to participate in the native title process with full understanding. Cassie acknowledged the system is not perfect and has many limitations but expressed particular concerns based on her understanding of the way anthropologists within the native title space are commissioned, with a narrow scope of work and preconceived ideas of what a claim should look like based on their preliminary research. Cassie has experience having to navigate inaccurate determinations that occur in the wake of incorrect or incomplete anthropologist reports. She described these erroneous determinations as burdensome and challenging to resolve. Cassie specifically noted how hard it was to hold people and government agencies accountable for failures in consultation and decision-making processes within the native title system, as there is a strong tendency to shift the blame around. Cassie believes there is a lack of accountability regarding technical experts such as historians, anthropologists and lawyers within the native title system. She discussed how they often don’t seem to realise when they have not fulfilled their roles or discharged their duties to a sufficiently high standard. Cassie noted that there doesn’t appear to be a way to complain about the services provided by an anthropologist, and there is no practical way of holding lawyers in the native title system accountable. Many of the queries Cassie receives are about the dissatisfaction a person or a group has with the delivery of services or advice provided by the respective NTRB/NTSP. Cassie recognised the important role NTRBs/NTSPs play in the native title space but emphasised the need for them to work better with both clients and professionals to enable more positive experiences. In Cassie’s view, NTRBs may struggle with competing interests between the best interests of the client and retaining the contract for provision of services to the client in order to retain the funding themselves. Despite the intention of the system to allow for native title groups to get the funding from the NTRB in order to pay for their own choice of professional, this is not how it plays out in most instances. Cassie has experienced native title groups being forced to use all the services of the NTRB if they want any support for their native title claim. In Cassie’s experience putting constraints on how native title claim groups/PBCs can access support from their NTRB/NTSP causes unnecessary tension between the client and the NTRB/NTSP. 92 Women in Native Title: Native Title Report 2024