Three desks, one file
A support coordinator, a solicitor and a physiotherapist each receive the same NDIS file. Here is the first thing each of them looks for, and why none of them can do the others' job.
Imagine the same envelope arriving on three desks in the same week.
Inside: nine years of medical records. Specialist letters, imaging, a discharge summary from a pain clinic. An NDIS access request and the decision that refused it. Two GP letters written afterwards. A functional capacity assessment from 2022. Correspondence with the Agency that runs to forty pages and settles nothing.
One copy goes to a support coordinator. One to a solicitor who does NDIS review work. One to me.
We each open it and look for something different. Not because two of us are wrong, but because we are answering different questions and are funded, trained and permitted to do different things about them.
The support coordinator
First question: what does this person need, and how does the plan pay for it?
The coordinator is looking for the practical shape of the situation. What is currently funded. What is being used and what is sitting idle. Which providers are involved, which have capacity, and which have quietly stopped returning calls. Whether the supports in the plan match the life the person is actually living.
They will usually see the problem before anyone else does, because they are the only one of the three with an ongoing relationship. They notice that the physiotherapy budget ran out in March. They notice that the person has stopped attending anything. They are often the first to say this plan is not working out loud.
That knowledge is not available to me. I read a file. A coordinator knows the person, the household, the providers and the history of what has already been tried and abandoned. When a coordinator tells me something about a client, it is usually the most reliable information I will receive.
What they are not funded or engaged to do. Coordination hours are for implementation: connecting supports, resolving service problems, making the plan work. Nobody funds a coordinator to spend six hours reading four hundred pages of clinical history against legislative criteria, and no coordinator I have worked with has that time available.
They are also not clinicians. A coordinator can describe accurately what they observe. They cannot make a clinical finding about why a condition persists, what a treatment achieved, or whether an impairment is likely to be permanent. Not because they lack the intelligence, but because the finding would carry no clinical weight, and a decision-maker would be right to give it none.
That combination (closest to the person, least resourced to produce evidence) is the awkward position coordinators are routinely put in. Participants and families often expect them to produce the document that changes the decision. It is not their job, they are not funded for it, and a great many of them do it anyway because nobody else will.
The solicitor
First question: what was decided, on what stated reasons, and how long do we have?
The solicitor goes straight to the decision. What kind of decision it was. What the letter says was not established. Whether it has been through internal review. What the review pathway is from here, and, first and most urgent, whether a deadline is running.
That last point deserves emphasis, because it is the one thing on this list that cannot be recovered. Evidence can be gathered late. A missed statutory deadline is often simply gone. I do not know your deadlines, I do not track them, and I am not the person to ask about them.
Then they look at the record the way an opponent will. Where is this argument weak. What would the Agency say. What has the Tribunal accepted before in matters like this, and what has it set aside. They can construct an argument from evidence that I would read as thin, because argument is their craft and it is not mine.
What they work from. A solicitor argues from the record as it exists. They can make a document say everything it is capable of saying. What they cannot do is put a functional assessment into a file that never contained one, or tell you that a whole category of pain treatment was never trialled, because identifying that is a clinical judgement about clinical care, not a legal one.
I have read decisions where the legal argument was plainly competent and the case still failed, because the evidence underneath it did not answer the question. That is not a failure of advocacy. You cannot argue a record into saying something it does not say.
The physiotherapist
First question: what does the clinical record establish, and where does it stop?
I read the whole file, in order, against two things at once: what the clinical history actually shows, and what the decision needed it to show.
That means the treatment history: every category of pain care, what was tried, what it achieved, and what was never opened at all. It means the functional record, which is usually where the file goes quiet. Nine years of scans and letters, and almost nothing about what an ordinary Tuesday takes.
What I produce is a finding: this is what your record establishes, this is where it stops, and this is what would close the gap.
What I do not do. I do not run the matter. I do not know your deadlines, I do not lodge anything, and I do not argue your case to the Agency. I cannot connect you to a service or spend a dollar of your plan. When someone asks me what their review prospects are, the honest answer is that it is not my question to answer, and I say so.
I give evidence, and then I stop. That limit is not modesty. It is what makes the evidence usable: a report from someone running the argument reads differently from a report from someone who is not.
Where the handoffs actually happen
Put plainly, the three roles are not competing versions of the same service. They are three parts of one problem, and most stalled files need at least two of them.
A coordinator notices the plan is not working. They can see it clearly and cannot document why in a form the Agency will act on. So the file comes to me, and the finding goes back to them to use in a review request, or to a solicitor if the pathway is contested.
A solicitor finds the evidence will not carry the argument. The law is fine; the record is silent where it needs to speak. The file comes to me, the gap gets named and closed, and the solicitor argues from something that now exists.
I find the problem is not clinical at all. Sometimes the finding is that the record is adequate and the difficulty is procedural, or that a deadline is the live issue, or that what is needed is advocacy rather than evidence. Then the referral goes the other way, and it should.
None of those handoffs work if the three of us pretend to do each other's jobs. The coordinator who writes the clinical argument, the clinician who advises on review strategy, the report written to support a case rather than to state what the record shows: each of those is well intentioned and each weakens the thing it was meant to strengthen.
The fourth desk
There is one more person who receives this file, and they are the reason any of it matters.
The delegate deciding the matter has never met the applicant. They cannot ask a follow-up question of the physiotherapist, they cannot ring the coordinator to check what an ordinary week looks like, and they cannot infer what the record does not say. They work from the documents in front of them, applying criteria they did not write.
Everything the three of us do is an attempt to put something usable on that desk. The coordinator contributes what the person actually needs. The solicitor contributes the argument and makes sure it arrives on time and in the right form. I contribute what the clinical record establishes, and a clear statement of where it goes quiet.
Files fail when one of those three contributions is missing and nobody noticed which one.
What this means in practice
The order is not fixed, and it depends on what is actually missing.
If a deadline is running, that is a question for a solicitor or an advocate before it is a question for anybody else, and it is worth asking today rather than after the file has been read.
If the plan is not delivering what a day requires, a coordinator will usually see the shape of that faster than I will.
And if a decision has come back saying the information provided does not demonstrate something, the useful next question is what the record does and does not establish, because until somebody answers that, neither of the other two has much to work with.
Observations drawn from published Tribunal and Court reasons, current as at the compilations cited. Nothing here is legal advice, and nothing here predicts an outcome. Every file turns on its own facts.