Rock-climbing Oliver Dickie took a "slightly unusual" path into the law – securing physics degrees in New Zealand and the United States before shelving life as an experimental scientist, coming home and doing law part-time.
"It's a pretty difficult existence in many ways," says Oliver, a senior associate at intellectual property law firm Ellis Terry, who recently returned to work after taking a year off to go climbing with his partner Philippa Yasbek – a South African of Lebanese descent.
- Name
- Oliver John (Oliver) Dickie
- Born
- Christchurch.
- Age
- 39.
- Entry to law
- Graduated BSc(Hons) in Physics from Canterbury University in 1999, MS (Physics) from Cornell University in 2003 and LLB from Victoria University in 2007. Admitted in 2008.
- Workplace
- Senior Associate at Ellis Terry, Wellington.
- Speciality area
- Patents, design, copyright.
"You are in a lab on your own for very very long hours and if you are very passionate it works… if not it destroys you…
"All my clients are scientists and engineers..."
"I realised I was good at physics but not passionate about it… I studied solid state physics, optics, the structure of semi-conductors, crystalline conductors and how they behave optically and electrically…
"But the life of an experimental scientist was not for me so I came back to New Zealand, got a job in a patent attorney firm and started law school as a part-timer in 2003…
"My legal practice is a little bit different to the norm… All my clients are scientists and engineers so it's very much still that technical side of things… I speak their language…
"Patent practitioners in New Zealand are failed scientists or failed engineers – it's not special to me…"
The first physicist and lawyer in his family Oliver is a devoted climber, as is his partner Philippa, a public policy consultant.
The couple met while rock climbing between studies at New York's Cornell University.
"Both of us had been climbing for a long time… We realised about three or four years ago we had not been climbing much because we were just working, so we started getting back into it…
"And yes, you fall all the time but you are roped..."
"About two years we decided to go and climb… So took a year off…
"Our favourite climbing areas are Thailand, Laos and Greece – Greece is a hotspot and world famous among climbers…
"Our favourite New Zealand climbs are in the central North Island around the shores of Lake Taupo, and in the Wanaka – Queenstown areas…
"There are a lot of different styles of rock climbing from climbing very difficult short things to much longer things where maybe the technical difficulty is not so high…
"Yes, it is toes and fingertips stuff…
"And yes, you fall all the time but you are roped and the rope catches you... Once you have fallen enough times you barely get a fright…
"Sport climbing is short and quite hard… Shorter difficult sport routes are often only 20 or 30 metres but we will also do one route for a couple of days to get it… Then there are long days, a long walk into the mountains and climbing for a full day before returning to camp…
"We also do mountaineering but always from the technical rock climbing aspect…
"I would like you to say I am a mediocre rock climber because I know of some other lawyers who are quite good rock climbers, I wouldn't like them to read it and think I'm good…
"My interests have narrowed over the years and climbing can become a bit of an obsession… It requires a lot of time to train… I don't compete but it is a competitive sport and is going to be in 2020 Tokyo Olympics for the first time…
"When travelling and climbing you beat yourself up to quite an extent and often have a day when lying around resting and having a read… I'm a fan of Peter Matthiessen's masterpiece Shadow Country… He worked on it more than 20 years… And Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex - also a masterpiece…
"I do not own a television and look forward to the Wellington film festival every year…
"I'm often picked up by other lawyers and my employers for having a Toyota Corolla, and before that a Nissan Sentra…
"As a climber my dinner guests would include Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker – both incredibly talented climbers and great authors of climbing literature who died together on Everest in 1982…
"I wouldn't feed them what climbers eat when they climbing, that is uninspiring… We would serve up some sort of Lebanese extravaganza…
"If I wasn't a lawyer I would be an engineer – no doubt about it… My mistake in early life was going into physics… if I had not done that I would probably have been an engineer, not a lawyer…"
Timaru-based Jock Anderson has been writing and commenting on New Zealand lawyers and New Zealand's courts for most of his career in journalism. Contact Jock at jockanderson123@gmail.com.