About

My name is Angela Cox and I am the Principal Lawyer and founder of Special Voices.

I am very passionate about helping families of children and adults with intellectual disability solve their unique legal problems and challenges as they journey through life together, to minimise their stress.

I understand the pressure, struggle and frustration that parents and siblings suffer as they are forced to navigate through complex and ever-changing laws and policies, and to often do battle with big and impersonal bureaucracies such as the NDIA, Centrelink and Medicare.

This is because I have ‘been there’ and indeed I am ‘still there’ due to my own family’s circumstances.

I have a younger brother with Down syndrome: he has severe intellectual disability and is virtually non-verbal. Growing up in the 1970 – 80s in Perth, Western Australia, I watched my parents fight for the health, education, recreation, respite and later employment and accommodation services that my brother – and also their friends’ children with intellectual disability – needed. 

My parents were actively involved in what were, back then, ‘grassroots’ disability organisations at the fore-front of the formative disability rights movements: Catholic Care for Intellectually Handicapped Persons (now Identity WA) and the Slow Learning Children’s Group (now Activ).

For the past few years, with my father long-deceased and my mother both ageing and frail, I have been my brother’s and mother’s representative and advocate in the NDIS, Centrelink and other systems.

My family’s experiences, my Me and My Brother community arts project (which told the stories of people with disability and their siblings) and my work for the Victorian Government on the design of the then new National Disability Insurance Scheme in 2011-15, motivated me to finally follow the advice that my mother had given  me when I was 18 years old: to become a lawyer for families of people with intellectual disability because (according to mum), ‘they need so much help’. Mothers have a knack for being right, don’t they?

So in 2017, I established Special Voices Disability Law and Advocacy. In 2021, my practice was relaunched and subsequently grew rapidly in several areas of disability law. From January 2024, I will focus on two practice areas:

1. the NDIS and
2. substitute decision-making

This is so I can better service parents’ high demand for quality legal and advocacy services in these complex areas.

I currently live in Melbourne, Victoria and frequently visit my home city of Perth, Western Australia. I love writing, running, cycling, hiking and animals (especially dogs!).