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New Zealand Law Society - LawTalk issue 912

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LawTalk issue 912

LawTalk issue 912

LawTalk issue 912

03 November 2017

The November issue of LawTalk features an interview with Solicitor-General Una Jagose QC on her vision for the stewardship of Crown legal service. The issue also has updates on developments in the law, more advice on preparing for AML/CFT phase 2 in 2018, advice on email services, helpful advice on workplace defibrillators and some interesting information on Panama hats.

Download LawTalk issue 912 (PDF file, 12.92 MB) View as a flip-book ISSUU.COM

The current paradigm for dispute resolution is litigation – a rights-based adversarial model that reflects an "argument-as-war" metaphor. This paradigm has its origins in Greek philosophy, which introduced a focus on critical analysis and deductive reasoning. That is, the process of applying logical principles to given premises or general facts…

Claudia King, who until a few months ago was the director of law firm Dennis King Law and its online brand Legal Beagle, recalls “doing a lot of really repetitive and boring document creation” as a lawyer. “I also spent a lot of time reviewing documentation prepared by my team as…

Chief Justice Sian Elias’ address, Managing Criminal Justice, to the Criminal Bar Association Conference in Auckland in August, raised a number of important concerns about so-called ‘innovations’ in New Zealand’s criminal justice system over the past decade. The use of audio-visual technology (AVL) in our courts was one of those…

Adam Holloway Law giant DLA Piper has connections in most parts of the globe, which is extremely handy when it comes to arranging pro bono projects in New Zealand. The firm describes itself as “one of the largest providers in the world” of pro bono services, with 270,000 hours donated during 2016. Adam…

There’s a night scene on a sandy beach during the classic original Point Break movie where the undercover FBI agent Johnny Utah says he went to law school. He is talking to the surfers otherwise known as the criminal group the Ex-Presidents. The film’s protagonist, Bodhi says “You’re a lawyer, well…

LawFest organiser Andrew King continues his series of interviews with key legal professionals with their innovation and technology stories. What has been your experience or interaction with legal innovation and technology? I’ve been working with our business teams to develop new financial services products and platforms. Many of our teams use agile…

It is hard to overstate the importance of starting well: the opening words of a speech, the early lines of a novel, the first few bars of a song. As an audience, a strong start gets our buy in. Get it wrong at the beginning though and you’ll struggle to…

Juridical Encounters: Māori and the Colonial CourtsBy Shaunnagh Dorsett Reviewed by Jeremy Finn Most New Zealand lawyers will not be particularly familiar with details of the legal developments during the Crown Colony period from 1840 to 1854. This general lack of awareness is substantially due to the dearth of good historical writing…

For much of my life I wanted to be a doctor. It seemed to be the hardest thing I could be. It would pay well, and everyone would know I was a good person without having to tell them all the time. My brother, father, grandfather and great-grandfather were all…

When Kiri Tahana decided to leave her corporate law job in Dubai she made the move back home to Rotorua after 15 years overseas. “This is where I’m from. I’m from Ngati Pikiao, Rotoiti, so I was always keen to eventually return home and use my legal skills to help…

The law firm Gibson Sheat has a long history in the Wellington region, with its origins dating back to the early 1900s. Today it has three offices, in Wellington, Lower Hutt and Masterton, with lawyers covering a wide area of practice with expertise in all aspects of business, litigation, personal legal…

People in the Law

Golriz GhahramanBeing uprooted from her home country as a child to escape a repressive regime has shaped human rights lawyer and new MP Golriz Ghahraman’s career and outlook. Ms Ghahraman left Iran in 1990 when she was nine, and her family were soon granted political asylum in New Zealand. “I lived through…

Dame Judith PotterThe stories of some of New Zealand’s pioneering women judges have been recorded for posterity – in their own voices. The New Zealand Women Judges Oral Histories project was the brainchild of the New Zealand Association of Women Judges, and was overseen by Dame Judith Potter and Justice Susan…

Update

Legal challenges over exclusion from minor party leaders' debates are something of a feature of general election campaigns. In 2005, the High Court ordered TV3 to include United Future’s Peter Dunne and the Progressives leader Jim Anderton in its debate. In 2014, the Conservatives’ Colin Craig successfully applied for an…

A class action proceeding claiming that James Hardie’s Harditex and Titan Board plaster cladding products are inherently defective and cause water ingress and damage has been given the green light by the Court of Appeal. In Cridge v Studorp Ltd [2017] NZCA 376, the Court of Appeal has also allowed a…

Pilots win age-discrimination case as the Supreme Court finds that non-discrimination rights are not contractual – Brown & Anor v New Zealand Basing Ltd [2017] NZSC 139. Cathay Pacific’s Hong Kong subsidiary, New Zealand Basing Ltd (NZBL), employed two airline pilots. The pilots were ultimately based in New Zealand, although their…

The Employment Relations Act 2000 (ERA) and the Human Rights Act 1993 (HRA) both have legislative mechanisms governing the evidence of the sexual experience and reputation of a claimant in a sexual harassment proceeding. The wording of s 116 of the ERA and s 62(4) of the HRA are almost identical.…

New Zealand has long been a favoured destination for British expats, with recent estimates suggesting there are more than 300,000 British citizens living here. Some reports have predicted a further surge in interest as a result of Brexit. Furthermore, many New Zealanders migrate in the other direction but maintain financial…

My last update (A New Land Transfer Act, LawTalk 909, August) considered three key issues arising from the Land Transfer Act 2017: the new terminology of “record of title” (RT), the new “manifest injustice” test as an important exception to immediate indefeasibility, and covenants in gross (and the continued role…

Provisions in the Fair Trading Act 1986 (FTA) prohibiting the inclusion of ‘unfair contract terms’ (UCT) in standard form consumer contracts came into force on 15 March 2015. Since then, the Commerce Commission has issued guidance on UCTs and conducted industry-wide reviews of telecommunications, retail energy and gym contracts, identifying…

Instances of lack of good faith by franchisors are a common complaint made by franchisees. A franchisee complains they are being singled out for a breach notice procedure when other franchisees are also in breach. A franchisor repeatedly declines prospective purchasers of a franchisee’s business because they want the franchisee…

In-house

The GPs of the Legal World - In-house lawyers

An in-house lawyer is sometimes referred to as the ‘GP of the legal world’. It’s true that there are a number of similarities. Like GPs, we triage a number of different matters in any given day. Similarly, we have to analyse whether we can give an answer straight away or whether…

Una Jagose QC, Solicitor-General and Chief Executive of Crown Law, talks with Katherine Lancaster, Senior Advisor Government Legal Network, about her ambitious vision for the stewardship of Crown legal service. There is an old German proverb: what is the use of running if you’re not on the right road? The phrase…

AML/CFT

In case you missed it, the first phase of Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act (AML/CFT) legislation came into force for banks, casinos and other key financial institutions back in 2013. Phase 2 will come into force in July 2018 for other sectors that deal in large amounts…

One of the main aims of New Zealand’s AML/CFT regime is the identification and management of money laundering (ML) and terrorist financing (TF) risks. The first recommendation within the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) standards is a requirement to understand ML/TF risks at a national and regulated entity level. This…

Technology

Five things lawyers believe that are bullshit

Many lawyers have a set of beliefs about how lawyers should act and do their legal work. Some of these beliefs are simply not true. Our legal training, the media, TV shows and movies about lawyers, and our relationships with other lawyers foster these beliefs. These beliefs also come from…

Last month we looked at why corporate IT is so awful. This month we’ll look at how it can be fixed. In most large organisations IT is viewed as a costly inhibitor to the business, rather than the driver for productivity, innovation and growth that it should be. It doesn’t have to…

Three new studies examining online civil courts, data encryption security and the use of posthumous healthcare data have been launched through the Law Foundation’s dedicated $2 million fund for information law and policy research. Technology is rapidly and unpredictably changing how we live and work, often before we can properly consider…

Vodafone recently announced that they are shutting down all of their email hosting services from 30 November. This is forcing hundreds of thousands of customers – some of whom have used their Vodafone-provided email addresses for decades – to migrate to alternative services. Many of these affected customers use these email…

Cloud-based eDiscovery software Everlaw aims to make electronic discovery as easy as a Google search or finding a movie on Netflix. Everlaw has been in the New Zealand market for about 18 months, through a partnership with Nulegal. Ben Kennedy, manager at eDiscovery and forensics at Nulegal, says Everlaw embodies machine…

Lawyers Complaints Service

[Names used in this article are ficticious] A lawyer who makes a threat to gain traction in negotiations is acting in a way that is “prejudicial to the administration of justice” a lawyers standards committee has said. The committee considered a complaint about a lawyer, Guildford, who made a threat in a…

Clifton Killip Lyon has been censured and fined $10,000 by a lawyers standards committee, following two findings of unsatisfactory conduct. A standards committee conducted an own-motion investigation into the conduct of a suspended lawyer, S. During the course of that investigation potential issues arose concerning Mr Lyon’s conduct that were referred…

[Names used in this article are ficticious] It is important for lawyers to deal with the ownership structure in relation to licences to occupy, particularly when they are dealing with clients in second relationships, a lawyers standards committee says. The committee observed that lawyers should have a ‘difficult conversation’ early on…