About Us

Collins Chambers is a specialist criminal defence practice based at 90 Collins Street, Melbourne.

The firm was established to serve a specific clientele, senior executives, professionals, business owners, and high net worth individuals, for whom a criminal allegation, investigation, or charge is not a familiar circumstance and cannot be treated as one. For this clientele, the matter itself is rarely the whole of the problem. A charge threatens a career, a licence, a directorship, a reputation, and a family, and the defence must be conducted with all of those consequences in view. That is the work the firm was built to do.

The practice concentrates on the most serious end of the criminal law, being complex indictable matters, corporate and financial crime, regulatory investigations, proceeds of crime, and appellate work. Its Partners appear in the Supreme Court and County Court of Victoria, before Commonwealth and State regulators and standing commissions, and in the Court of Appeal. Much of the firm’s most valuable work is done before any court is involved at all, in the period between first contact from an investigator and the decision whether a charge will ever be laid.

Matters are conducted with the same standards of preparation, discretion, and strategic clarity that clients expect from their commercial advisers. In practice this means the prosecution case is mastered before strategy is settled, counsel is selected for the matter rather than from habit, expert evidence is commissioned early and integrated into the defence rather than appended to it, and the client is advised plainly at every stage, including when the advice is unwelcome. Candour is a form of respect, and the firm extends it without exception.

Collins Chambers is deliberately small and accepts a limited number of engagements at any time. This is not a marketing position. It is how the firm is structured. Every matter is led personally by a partner from the first conference to the final orders. Advice is given directly, by the person responsible for the matter, not relayed through intermediaries. Client information is held in the strictest confidence, and the firm’s processes are built for clients whose circumstances require that an engagement remain unknown to anyone beyond it.

The firm’s Partners have conducted matters of significant public profile, such as murder trials, terrorism prosecutions, large-scale drug and confiscation proceedings, and matters attracting sustained media attention. Where a matter carries a public dimension, the firm treats the management of that dimension as part of the defence, not separate from it. Just as often, the measure of the firm’s work is that a matter never becomes public at all.

Engagement is by referral from existing clients, professional advisers, and members of the profession. The firm works closely with its clients’ existing advisers, commercial solicitors, accountants, and family offices, recognising that a criminal matter arrives in the middle of a life and a business, not apart from them. Prospective clients are welcome to make direct contact.