Law Society elects female Pasifika head
AUCKLAND: New Zealand’s Law Society has elected its first female president of Pacific Island descent.
Gisborne lawyer Tiana Epati will take over from the current president, Kathryn Beck, who completes her threeyear term in April.
At 43 years old, Ms Epati is also the youngest president and will be the fourth woman in the role since the first president was elected in 1897.
Ms Epati, a partner with Gisborne law firm Rishworth Wall & Mathieson, was president of the Law Society in Gisborne from 2014 to 2016 and was elected vicepresident for the Central North Island in April 2016.
She was admitted as a barrister and solicitor in September
2000 after graduating from the University of Auckland, before spending four years as a Crown prosecutor with Auckland law firm Meredith Connell.
She later moved to Wellington to work as a Crown prosecutor and in the public law team at Izard Weston.
After moving to the Crown Law Office to work on the criminal law team in 2008, Epati moved to Gisborne four years later where she has worked as a criminal defence lawyer with Rishworth Wall & Mathieson.
One of Epati’s first challenges in her new role will be tackling what Beck has described as ‘‘a cultural crisis in the New Zealand legal profession’’.
In late May, a Law Society survey showed one in five lawyers had been sexually harassed in their workplace and about one in three female lawyers.
The survey had 3516 lawyers take part and was most thorough examination of the legal profession’s workplace environment after a series of scandals hit the country’s top law firms.
— NZME