Sitting to commemorate the 150th Anniversary of the New Zealand Law Society
The following speech was delivered by Kate Davenport QC, President of New Zealand Bar Association | Ngā Ahorangi Motuhake o te Ture, on 25 October 2019 at a special sitting to commemorate the 150th Anniversary of the New Zealand Law Society.
Kia ora koutou katoa
E ngā mana, e ngā reo, e te iwi whanui, tēnā koutou,
E te Kaiwhakawā Tumuaki, tēnā koe
E te Kaiwhakawā Mātua, tēnā koe
E ngā kaiwhakawā o te Kōti Mana Nui, te Kōti Pīra, te Kooti Mātua me te Kōti a Rohe, tēnā koutou.
Nō reira, tēnā koutou katoa
Ka nui te hari me te koa ki te mihi atu ki a koutou katoa i tēnei noho whakanui
May it please the Court.
Your Honours, distinguished guests, with a holiday weekend ahead of us, and this being the last of the speeches today, I will keep this brief. (Besides which, the Chief Justice has probably already started the stopwatch!). I am delighted to be giving this speech on behalf of the New Zealand Bar Association | Ngā Ahorangi Motuhake o te Ture.
Yesterday I attended the same celebratory event in Dunedin and was privileged to hear three outstanding speeches from young(ish) practitioners in Dunedin. I asked the President of the Otago branch of the Law Society if I could have a copy of her speech. She seemed flattered, and it was a good speech but in truth, I was hoping to take a few of her words to use today but unfortunately, I haven’t received it yet so these views are original.
150 years for any institution is a milestone – it shows it has continuing appeal to the members it serves and has changed enough to be relevant to modern members and this is to be celebrated but it is also a time for reflection, to look back as we look forward. This, as the Chief-Justice reminded us yesterday in her speech at the dinner given by the Otago Law Society part in her honour, is part of the great common law tradition to take the lessons of the past and apply them to the future. So too with the Law Society – who has announced a review of its operations and these are a few of my ideas and reflections on how we can take lessons from the past and chart a new legal future.
At about the same time 150 years ago two events occurred that provided structure in their respective fields and enabled rapid change. The first was the creation of the periodic table of elements by the Russian chemist Dmitrii Ivanovich Mendeleev, which has been described as arguably the most important discovery in chemistry. It has given structure and meaning to our understanding of the organic and inorganic world.
The second event was the formation of the New Zealand Law Society. This gave structure and form to the new profession and a platform for its future growth. It was the genesis of something great. But as we know the formation of the Law Society was not enough to ensure its continuity. It had to learn some hard lessons, beginning with the reflection of its treatment of women. Ethel Benjamin – our first woman lawyer was also honoured in Dunedin yesterday. Ethel was admitted a year after women were permitted to become lawyers in 1897. A milestone indeed but she suffered for this. Only one man would walk with her in the 1902 opening of the Dunedin law courts and the Law Society did not cover itself in glory in its treatment of her – they refused to allow her to attend Law Society dinners and tried to impose a dress code on her – designed to stop her from working. In the end, she only practised for 11 years in New Zealand before moving to the UK where she had to wait another 10 years until they passed legislation before she could work as a lawyer.
There is no doubt that that is not the Law Society we know today – it has grown and changed over the years and stood firm behind the profession through the various crises which have beset it. In my practising life, there has been Renshaw Edwards where two partners individually stole large sums of money and where every solicitor who was a principal had to contribute $10,000 to meet the losses. The 1st woman president of the Law Society, the honourable Judith Potter steered the profession through this. Then there were the trials of the drafting of the 2006 Lawyers and Conveyancers Act with the attempts by the government to deregulate reserved areas of work. It took about 10 years to come to completion but through the crisis issues of law reform, big and small, it has made intelligent comment and shown leadership. It has peopled the Citizens Advice Bureau, provided lawyers to legal aid and pro bono work. Law has an ethos of service and hundreds of lawyers through the Law Society have given their time free of charge to teach others, to do the hard work of law reform submissions, to act in the Regulatory Complaints committees and served in a myriad of ways. In my career, I have been privileged to have been a member of this body and to have served as a Vice President of the NZLS.
So, like the periodic table, the Law Society has given the lawyers of New Zealand structure and certainty.
But, there are things which we should not be proud of and that is in our treatment of those who are not the traditional white, male lawyer – our women, Maori and our Pacifica and Asian lawyers. In the 1980s when I entered the profession women represented 50% of my graduating class – but despite my academic achievements, those early job interviews were full of statements such as ’we have a woman, so we don’t need more’ and questions about my future reproductive plans. In my time in this profession, I have been sexually harassed, bullied, sent home to change into a skirt (from pants) and yet I have done nothing about it, like many others. I have not spoken out. I have participated in working groups in the ’80s and ’90s which recognised the problems – then just for women – but have seen no change. It has been this latest crisis for the profession with the treatment of 5 young women at a large law firm that there has come the belated universal recognition that we are a profession where despite our great attributes we have fallen down in our treatment of our own – we have allowed a culture of bullying, hard work, fear and harassment to seem commonplace – where you don’t mention it and you try to survive. We are a profession nurtured by a Law Society with a love for the law – but we don’t extend that to our people, our whanau, our brothers and sisters and this has driven young lawyers from the profession in droves which is our loss.
But now it seems to me there is hope – the work of Kathryn Beck, the 3rd New Zealand Law Society woman President and now Tiana Epati the 4th is inspirational and, I hope, transformational in facing our problems and vowing to fix our future.
Barack Obama said “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change we seek”.
This is my challenge to our society – we are all part of this organisation and we are the change.
I commend those who have taken on board this challenge but know that all of us must lead.
The New Zealand Bar Association | Ngā Ahorangi Motuhake o te Ture supports the Law Society’s efforts in this regard. We join with it in trying to reshape the future of the profession into a diverse but inclusive community of lawyers.
We all must work together now. The only way forward is by understanding behaviour and its effects on our people – and developing a structure in which we can all interact with respect, humour and intelligence – no matter what gender, race or creed.
I won’t be here in 150 years time (even if the Chief Justice feels this speech is roughly equivalent to that length of time)! And probably, neither will my children’s’ children. But if we act now, there will be generations of lawyers who love the law as I do. I hope that in 150 years’ time they look back to this moment and say that once again, we stepped up to provide a structure and platform for moving forward – not just for some, but for all.
May it please the court.
