Paul Duggan's documented life is centred on Melbourne, the capital of the Australian state of Victoria. The University of Melbourne, where he studied law, was established in the 1850s with financial support drawn from the prosperity of the Victorian gold rush.
The university's law school was founded in 1857 and offered Australia's first law course, establishing a model that joined academic study of legal principles with training for legal practice.
Duggan's documented university education is a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Melbourne. The law school, founded in 1857, was the first law course established in Australia, and it combined scholarly teaching of legal principles with preparation for legal practice.
For much of its history the Melbourne LLB was a graduate-level professional degree that qualified students for admission to legal practice. The school discontinued the LLB after its final intake in 2007 and thereafter offered the Juris Doctor as its entry-level law degree.
Duggan's principal documented professional affiliation was with Phillips Fox, a Melbourne law firm, where he worked as a partner. The firm traces its origins to 1864, when it began as the practice of P.D. Phillips, and it has since grown into one of the largest law firms in Australasia.
He was admitted to the bar in Victoria in 1975, a step that qualified him to practise law in the state. Later in the firm's history, Phillips Fox entered an exclusive alliance with the global firm DLA Piper and began operating under the name DLA Phillips Fox.
