Child protection practitioners are co-located at the Melbourne and Dandenong registries of the federal family law courts. An initial program, run from 2012, found that the role assisted courts in cases where child protection issues are raised and provided leadership to other child protection staff in relation to family law matters.
The practitioner's role is to facilitate information sharing between the court and child protection where families were engaged with both the Victorian child protection system and the Commonwealth family law system. Better information sharing has been shown to improve decision making about the best interests of children who are the subject of legal proceedings in the family law jurisdiction.