This Father’s Day, we talk to fourth-generation lawyer Cameron Webster, who followed his dad into the profession – via world championship rowing and an America’s Cup victory.
Cameron Webster’s taken quite a different route into the law than most young lawyers.
Along the way, there have been world championship rowing medals, Olympic dreams, a decade in New Zealand’s high-performance rowing system and, most recently, an America’s Cup victory as a cyclor with Emirates Team New Zealand.
And while banking all those achievements as a professional athlete, he was also chipping away at a law degree.
The 31-year-old is now building his legal career as a solicitor at Lewis Lawyers in Cambridge, working across property and commercial law.
In doing so, he’s continuing a family tradition stretching back more than a century, as the fourth generation of his family to practise law.
The fourth-generation club
Cameron’s great-grandfather Trentham Charles Webster was admitted in Auckland in 1919 and later established his own firm, Trentham C. Webster, in 1925. In 1954, he moved the admission of his son, Blair Daniel Webster.
Cameron with his parents Penny and Donald at his admission to the bar in November 2025.
Twenty-six years later, Blair – whose firm Webster Malcolm continues today in Warkworth – did the same for his son, Cameron’s father Donald Blair Webster.
Cameron with his parents Penny and Donald at his admission to the bar in November 2025.
And in November last year, it was Donald’s turn, standing before Judge Blanchard to move Cameron’s admission.
“I do feel the lineage that is behind me, but then again I never felt any pressure in relation to that,” Cameron says.
“Dad’s always been no-pressure. He always wanted to help facilitate what I wanted to do. But as I got closer to this profession, it became evident there’s a lot of history in the family.”
That really hit home at his admission.
“I’m standing there and Dad reads out my admission speech in front of the judge and talks about his father and grandfather. It felt special to be part of that.”
Donald says it was a moment where he was “choked up like heck”.
And there was another nice connection afterwards. Judge Blanchard approached Donald to tell him he too belonged to the fourth-generation club, with his own family spanning generations in the law.
A long road to law
Cameron grew up in Greenhithe on Auckland’s North Shore and took up rowing at Westlake Boys High School. It turned out he was very good at it.
By 2012, he had made the New Zealand under-18 team and won gold in the coxed four at the junior world championships. The following year he was Westlake’s rowing captain.
In 2014, he began studying law at Auckland University of Technology.
There was no grand plan behind that decision. Cameron says he was good at English, enjoyed talking to people and had grown up with considerable respect for his father and the way he went about his work.
What he didn’t realise then was that his degree would take almost a decade to complete, slotted in around an increasingly serious sporting career.
In his second year, Cameron moved to Cambridge for rowing and continued his degree largely part-time.
Meanwhile, rowing was taking him around the world. He won under-23 world championship silver in 2015 and gold the following year, then competed at senior world championships in 2017 and 2018.
His parents, Donald and Penny, were along for much of the ride, following him overseas and watching him somehow keep the law studies going at the same time.
“It was just amazing to follow him on those journeys, but all the while he was plugging away at a law degree and trying to study when he was just dead tired,” Donald says.
“How he kept his eyes open to study after long physical days of training is beyond me.”
Cameron’s big goal was the Olympics. He was in the wider squad competing for a seat in the New Zealand eight for Tokyo but missed selection for the crew that went on to win gold.
He continued rowing at the elite level until 2022, when he was advised not to trial for the next world championships.
After a decade chasing that Olympic goal, there was sadness, but also relief.
“I’d borne the brunt of this goal on my shoulders. The goal was to get to the Olympics, to be dominant, to prove myself to everybody.”
At first he went through what he describes as a period of “existential dread”.
But then law become more than something just ticking over in the background. He had started to enjoy the way it challenged his thinking.
“The legal framework is very rigorous and dynamic, and I found that really interesting.”
From rowing boat to America’s Cup boat
Then another opportunity landed.
A strength and conditioning coach for Emirates Team New Zealand was scouting for athletes for its new group of cyclors to generate the hydraulic power for the America’s Cup yacht.
Cameron was interested straight away. His father and brother were sailors, he had grown up with a healthy regard for Team New Zealand and, after years of elite rowing, the fitness certainly wasn’t a problem.
He joined Team New Zealand in January 2023 and was one of nine cyclors eventually selected for its 2024 America’s Cup campaign.
That opened another chapter of professional sport, this time based in Barcelona.
But there was one thing he had decided: he was still going to finish his law degree.
Against the advice of some around him, Cameron told Team New Zealand he needed two days a week for study.
He finished his final semester around the punishing cyclor training programme and finally graduated with his LLB in December 2023.
As he walked across the stage at Spark Arena for his capping ceremony, his dad shouted from the audience: “Ten years, Cam!”
And for all his son’s medals and sporting achievements, Donald says it’s Cameron’s tenacity to finish his law degree that makes him most proud.
There were years of fitting papers around training, studying when he was exhausted and just keeping at it.
Donald offered help, but says Cameron rarely asked for it.
“He got it on his own merit.”
The following year Cameron devoted himself to Team New Zealand, which successfully defended the America’s Cup in Barcelona in October 2024.
Then he came home to Cambridge and, for a time, the America’s Cup winner worked as a gardener.
But by early 2025, it dove straight back into the other career he had spent almost a decade preparing for. He finished his professional legal studies and joined Lewis Lawyers as a law clerk in June, before his admission in November.
Starting again as a novice
For someone used to operating at the elite level of sport, becoming the least experienced person in the room took some getting used to.
“I was going along on a path where I knew the landscape and was quite competent, and then coming into law it was a shock how little competence I had,” Cameron says.
He has, at least, come into law very used to feedback.
“In one rowing session there are constant referrals back to the coach and constantly having the conversation about how to improve.
“In the corporate world it’s less frequent, but still just as important. I’m craving as much feedback as I can get because I’m so used to that constant feedback loop,” Cameron says.
He’s also had to get used to a very different timeframe for progress. Sport operates season to season; a legal career could span decades.
“With law, you might be doing it for the rest of your life. You have to adjust the expectation and desire for growth to be sustainable, as opposed to rapid.”
Now a year into his legal career, Cameron is starting to get a clearer idea of where it might eventually take him.
Sports law interests him, as does the possibility of working in-house for a professional sports organisation one day – perhaps even a motorsport team.
Following Dad
Donald remains one of Cameron’s strongest reference points for the sort of lawyer he would like to become.
“My only real reference is knowing the deep respect and reverence I have for my dad and how he operates,” Cameron says.
“He’s calm and understanding and empathetic, but also confident and astute and hard-nosed when he needs to be.
“He gives people a lot of grace and the benefit of the doubt. He gets the best out of a lot of people around him because he gives them the time of day. I really respect that about him.”
Donald, a director at WebsterLaw in Takapuna, hopes one quality his son carries into the profession is empathy.
He says Cameron is “a very empathetic and caring person”.
And there’s something else he’d like to pass on from his own years in practice.
“I think Cameron will learn to be hard when he needs to be hard,” Donald says.
“If I can teach him anything, it would be that you can be a hard-nosed lawyer but not a hard-nosed person.
“You need to do what you need to do during the day and be an empathetic and soft person in the evening.”
Given that’s almost exactly how Cameron describes the qualities he most admires in his dad, that could be the part of the Webster family legal tradition that matters most.
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