terms of service

These terms are an agreement between you and the operator of The Last Step, ABN 42 961 240 633. By using thelaststep.com.au you accept them. If you do not accept them, do not use the tool. The tool was developed by an Attorney-General’s Department registered family dispute resolution practitioner, Reg. No. F2003011, in consultation with a panel of family lawyers.

1. What The Last Step is, and is not

The Last Step is document preparation software. You answer questions about your own circumstances and about the agreement the two of you have already reached. The tool checks your answers for completeness and internal consistency, and then assembles your answers into the Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia's own forms: an Application for Consent Orders and a Minute of Consent Orders, together with the supporting documents your answers call for.

Everything the tool produces is your document. You prepare your own application. We do not decide what your orders should say, we do not choose terms for you, and we do not tell you whether your agreement is a good one. The tool only ever assembles from a fixed library of standard-form clauses; it does not write new terms for your matter.

The tool sits in the same category as the Court's own do-it-yourself kit. The difference is that it checks your work as you go and fills the Court's forms for you.

2. This is not legal advice

Nothing on this site and nothing the tool produces is legal advice. Using The Last Step does not create a lawyer and client relationship between you and anyone. No one at The Last Step is acting as your lawyer.

Independent legal advice is always your right, and you may get it at any point, including after your documents are generated and before you sign or file them. For many people it is money well spent. The tool never suggests you do not need it, and it never ticks the box in the Statement of Truth that says you have had it. Only you can tick that, for yourself.

The operator of The Last Step is not a lawyer. A panel of Australian family lawyers advises on the governance of the product. That is a governance role. It does not mean a lawyer has reviewed your documents, and it does not mean a lawyer is advising you.

3. What the tool covers

The tool prepares property and financial consent orders only, including superannuation splitting orders where your answers call for them.

The tool does not prepare parenting orders. That is a deliberate decision, not a limitation we intend to remove casually. The Court's parenting pathway requires risk certifications about children that we do not think belong in unsupervised self-service software.

The Court's form requires details about any child of either of you who is under 18, even when your orders are only about money, because the Court considers children's arrangements when deciding whether a division is just and equitable. The tool asks for those details. Answering them does not create parenting orders and does not ask the Court to make any.

Some circumstances sit outside the tool entirely. Where your answers show one of them, the tool stops and tells you plainly. Section 10 explains this.

4. Your responsibilities

You agree that:

• You are at least 18 and you are entering your own information, or the information of the person whose matter this is with their knowledge.
• The two of you have already reached an agreement. The tool records an agreement; it does not negotiate one.
• Every answer you give is true and complete to the best of your knowledge. Where a figure is an estimate, it is an honest estimate.
• You will make full and frank disclosure of your financial circumstances to the other party, which the Court's rules require of you whether or not you use this tool.
• You will read every document the tool produces before you sign it, and you will read the filing instructions before you file.
• You will not use the tool to prepare documents for other people as a service, and you will not scrape, copy or resell it.

The tool cannot know whether your figures are correct. It checks that they add up, not that they are true. Values you enter are your agreed estimates and the Court's Statement of Truth asks you to confirm they were made in good faith.

5. Both of you, and the handover between you

An Application for Consent Orders needs both of you. One of you starts the matter and sends it to the other by email from inside the tool. The second person completes their own part, marks whether they agree with each proposed item, and either signs or sends it back with their reasons.

In normal operation a matter changes hands only through that emailed handover, from each person's own inbox. This is deliberate: it makes it hard for one person to sit beside the other and complete both sides on one device. If our email sender is unavailable the tool falls back to showing the link on screen, so that a matter is never stranded, and in that case the protection rests on the three identity questions alone.

Opening a matter needs more than the link. The emailed link carries only half of what is needed. The other half is three things the other party is asked to confirm about themselves: their date of birth, their phone number, and the postcode of their address for service. Those answers must match what you entered for them in part 02. That separation is what protects you if an email address is mistyped or you are given the wrong one, because a misdirected email does not bounce and nobody finds out. It also means that if you enter any of those details incorrectly, the other party will not be able to open the matter however carefully they answer. After five wrong attempts the stored copy is destroyed and we email you to check what you entered.

Neither of you can tick the other's declarations. The tool refuses it. If you are the second person and you do not agree, you are not required to sign. Sending it back with your reasons is a complete and legitimate answer, and so is stopping.

6. Price, payment and the court's own fee

The Last Step is free to use and free to check. You pay once, per couple, at the point the documents are generated. The price appears on the home page from your first visit and before you start, and it is $695 per couple, whatever your matter involves. There are no other charges from us.

The Court charges its own filing fee when you lodge. That fee is set by the Commonwealth, it is not ours, we do not receive any part of it, and it is payable in addition to our price. Reduced fees are available from the Court in some circumstances and that is a matter between you and the Court.

One payment covers one matter, for both of you. You may regenerate your documents as often as you need for twelve months from payment, at no extra charge and with no limit on the number of changes. That right attaches to that matter and does not transfer to a different one.

7. What we do not promise about the Court

We do not promise that the Court will make the orders you ask for. We cannot. A Registrar decides whether to make consent orders and must be satisfied the outcome is just and equitable in your circumstances. That decision is theirs and it depends on facts only you know.

A Registrar may also ask questions before deciding, which is called a requisition. A requisition is a normal part of the process and not a failure. Our requisitions page explains the common ones and what to do about each. Section 11 and our support page explain what we do if a requisition or a rejection is caused by a defect in our software rather than by your own circumstances or choices.

We do not lodge anything for you. Filing is done by you through the Commonwealth Courts Portal, and the pack includes instructions.

8. The court's forms and our own material

The tool completes the Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia's published forms. Those forms are Commonwealth material and remain the Commonwealth's. They are reproduced for the purpose they exist for, which is for a party to complete and file in that Court. We claim nothing in them.

Everything else, being the software, the questions, the checks, the clause library, the explanatory text, the name and the branding, belongs to us. You get a personal, non-transferable right to use the tool to prepare your own documents and to keep and use the documents it produces for your own matter. That right does not extend to using our material to build or run a competing service.

The mediator resources

Separately from the tool, we publish free resources for mediators at thelaststep.com.au/mediator-resources: a disclosure pack you can print for the parties, and a settlement workbook that runs in your browser. They are ours, and different terms apply to them, because they are made to be used with other people's matters.

If you are a mediator, or another professional running a financial mediation, you have our permission to use them in your own practice, to put your own name and branding on them, to translate them, and to give the printed pages to the parties. That permission is free, non-exclusive, and revocable. You do not have to credit us and you do not have to tell us.

What it does not cover: selling them, charging for them as a product in their own right, or taking them apart to build a competing tool or kit. The wording, the checks and the clause reasoning inside them stay ours.

They come with no promise attached. They are working aids, not advice, and nothing in them is legal advice to you or to anyone in your room. You remain responsible for your own practice, your own professional obligations and your own insurance. Nothing about using them makes us a party to your mediation, and nothing in them binds anybody: a Heads of Agreement produced by the workbook is a record of what was agreed, not an agreement that binds either party and not a court order.

9. Your information

Your answers stay in your own browser. There are no accounts and no database of matters. We do not store your financial details. They are never sent to us in a form we can read, and there is no copy of them in our systems. The one exception is the encrypted handover between the two of you, which is explained honestly, including its limits, in our privacy policy. Please read it, because the architecture is unusual and the consequences for you are real: if you clear your browser data before you finish, your answers are gone and we cannot recover them for you.

10. When we stop and send you elsewhere

Some circumstances need a lawyer, not software. When your answers show one, the tool stops, says so plainly, and tells you where to go. It is not a dead end and it is not a judgement about you. At the time of writing they are: an existing binding financial agreement; a bankruptcy or personal insolvency; property that is the subject of proceeds of crime action; someone other than the two of you whose rights your orders would affect, who has not been given written notice; property being transferred or sold that is owned by a company, trust or self managed superannuation fund rather than by one of you personally; a de facto relationship that ended before the federal scheme began, or one where the Court's own gateway for de facto couples is not met; a superannuation interest that has already been split once; a proposal to split a defined benefit or self managed superannuation interest; both of you being members of the same self managed fund; a superannuation interest below the statutory floor of $10,000; a pool that is nil or negative; and a division further from equal than 30/70. Western Australia is not a stop but a limit on where we operate: a family law matter there, married or de facto, goes to the Family Court of Western Australia and uses that court's own forms and signing requirements, so the tool does not offer it.

The tool also stops rather than guessing. If it cannot complete a form correctly, it refuses to produce the document instead of producing one that is wrong. We think a refusal you can act on is better than a document you cannot trust.

11. Consumer guarantees and liability

You have rights under the Australian Consumer Law that we cannot exclude, restrict or modify, and nothing in these terms tries to. Among other things, our software must be fit for its purpose and match its description. Where we have failed on those guarantees, you are entitled to a remedy, and our support page sets out how we handle it.

Beyond those guarantees, and to the extent the law allows:

• We are not responsible for the consequences of information you enter incorrectly, for an agreement that turns out to be a poor bargain for you, or for a decision you make without legal advice.
• We are not responsible for what the Court decides, for the time the Court takes, or for a requisition or rejection arising from your own circumstances or choices.
• We are not responsible for loss of your answers where you clear your browser data, use a private browsing window, or lose the device you were working on.
• Where we are liable and the law permits us to limit it, our liability is limited to resupplying the software or refunding what you paid us.

We do not limit liability for fraud, or for anything the law does not permit us to limit.

12. Changes, suspension and these terms

We improve the tool often and we update the court forms when the Court does. We may change or suspend the service, and we may change these terms. The version and date at the top of this page tell you which terms apply. If you have already paid for a matter, the terms that applied when you paid are the ones that govern it.

If any part of these terms cannot be enforced, the rest still applies.

13. Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of Victoria, Australia, and by the law of the Commonwealth where it applies. The courts of Victoria and the federal courts have jurisdiction, and nothing here affects your right to take a consumer complaint to the relevant authority in your own state or territory.

14. Contact

Sole trader, ABN 42 961 240 633, trading as The Last Step, Victoria, Australia.
Contact is through the support form or support@thelaststep.com.au; nothing about your matter travels with either unless you type it. General enquiries that are not about a matter can go through the contact page.

If something has gone wrong, tell us before you tell anyone else, because we can usually fix it quickly. If we cannot resolve it, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and your state or territory consumer affairs office can help.