Daniel is an experienced lawyer with significant experience providing high quality legal services to clients in with indigenous rights-based frameworks, including native title, Aboriginal land rights and cultural heritage. He brings a extensive experience negotiating indigenous land use agreements and Aboriginal land agreements, as well as native title claims and litigation involving appeals against the refusal of Aboriginal land claims.
As a dedicated legal professional specialising in Indigenous land rights, Daniel has experience across a broad range of legal areas, including administrative law, constitutional law, cultural heritage, statutory construction, native title, property law, and intentional torts.
He also has extensive litigation and alternative dispute resolution experience, having managed litigation teams and having personally appeared in hearings in the Local Court, District Court, Supreme Court, Federal Court, Full Federal Court, and instructed in hearings in the NSW Court of Appeal and the High Court.
Daniel started his career in native title and Aboriginal land rights at the NSW Crown Solicitor's Office from 2011 to 2016, after which he spent 8 years in senior executive roles leading the legal team responsible for managing native title claims in the NSW Government before joining the NSW Aboriginal Land Council as its General Counsel in 2024.
Career highlights include:
- leading the negotiation of the first Aboriginal Land Agreement in NSW;
- leading the team responsible for the resolution of all native title claims which were lodged between 1998 and 2008, which, when determining the last pre-2000 claim in New South Wales, Robertson J remarked was ‘a milestone in native title determinations in this country’;
- facilitating as many determinations recognising native title between 2017 and 2022 as there were in the preceding 23 years;
- leading the successful negotiation of Indigenous land use agreements on behalf of the NSW Government with the Western Bundjalung, Bandjalang, Yaegl, Barkandji, Gumbaynggirr, Widjabul Wia-bal and Wongkumara native title groups (leading the negotiation for more agreements between 2018 and 2023 than the previous 24 years); and
- representing gvernment at interjurisdictional meetings, being a member of the Commonwealth government’s expert technical advisory group on the Native Title Act and supporting the NSW Attorney General at the interjurisdictional Ministers' Meetings.
Daniel is also on the Board of Birribee Housing and the NSW Law Society's Indigenous Issues Committee.
For more information, please view his LinkedIn profile.