A lawyer's role is to provide legal advice to their client and, perhaps more importantly, to provide advice on the best way of solving a given legal dispute in terms of process and likelihood of success. Recent research has suggested that lawyers find it difficult to predict success in terms of litigation and they too often litigate while failing to consider other dispute resolution forums such as arbitration and mediation. The research has suggested that part of the problem is the unreliability of lawyers' predictions of success. This has a significant impact on the financial situation of their clients as well as on greater social issues including access to justice. Quadrat IT Systems ('Quadrat') is a small niche Melbourne company specialised in IT systems. As a response to the above-mentioned research, and motivated by the regularity with which clients lose cases that they had been advised they could win, Quadrat has in the past years been involved with an innovative dispute resolution IT system. Peter Parker is the main IT engineer at Quadrat and, for the past three years, he has been working on an IT prediction system that can assist commercial organisations in deciding whether to litigate, arbitrate, mediate, and how to settle disputes at mediation. Peter had the idea for the system based on the firm belief that science could make more reliable predictions of the outcome of legal claims than lawyers could. After 3 years of research and testing, Quadrat has developed CasePredict - a programme based on some very complex algorithms for predicting the prospects of success in commercial disputes. This was a very exciting invention for Quadrat and they want to protect the system in the best possible way. Quadrat has therefore submitted an application for the grant of a patent for CasePredict. Sabrina Henderson, a member of the public with an interest in the matter, seeks to oppose the application on the ground that CasePredict is not a "manner of manufacture" under the Patents Act 1990 (Cth).

REQUIRED

Please advise Quadrat on whether the invention satisfies the definition of a manner of manufacture and whether it is patentable under Australian law.

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