With Crispy Pork Bao on the menu and collegiality in the air, President of The Law Association Tony Herring took the floor in East Auckland.
“When I was a young thing, we used to go out to the bank and we used to go out to the Land Transfer Office and we used to go out to the Companies Office and we’d meet our colleagues there and we would get to know them and then we’d go and have a coffee with them and we’d go have a beer with them.”
Herring continued, “then when there was a transaction going wrong on a Friday, we could ring them and say, why is your client being so difficult? And he or she would say, well, I know you, Tony, because we caught up when we went to the Companies Office, and we’d sort it out.”
“That doesn’t happen much these days, because everyone’s stuck behind their computers, sending emails.”
Herring told the gathering of lawyers that that was the point of getting together for lunch at Master Kongs restaurant at Sylvia Park.
With the conversation and fried dumplings on a roll, it became hard for those getting out from behind the screens, to believe this wasn’t a good idea.
Jasmine Pyke from Sutcliffe Matson Law said it was nice to be able to talk to the other lawyers they were communicating with all the time. “It’s great to see people face to face, especially people who I’ve spoken to or emailed, and I don’t usually get to see them.”
Rita Williams from DG Law agreed on the value of the meet up. “There are a number of people that I’ve met today who I’ve been dealing with, that I’ve never actually seen in person” she said.
“I think sealing those connections with people actually makes it easier to be able to work on a professional basis.”
Beyond the CBD and out in the harder to get to parts of New Zealand’s biggest city it seems that many lawyers are generalists working across a number of legal disciplines. Yet the same topics are the focus of many conversations. Jasmine Pyke says there is one thing that keeps cropping up, “our biggest issue is probably AI nowadays, right? Clients trying to use it and then encountering problems, then having to come to us to fix them, clients think they can use AI to draft something and then send it to you and it’s all good.”
At the same table Jasmine’s boss Braden Matson, partner at Sutcliffe Matson Law echoed the sentiment, “clients will give us all the law and what they want to send in a letter, but it’s not necessarily legal. So, we’ve got to rewrite it and get rid of all the nonsense.”
Regardless, the legal profession is alive and well in East Auckland, and lawyers are busy, those at the lunch we spoke to said that engaging a lawyer in the suburbs is actually an easier proposition than in the city centre. Helen Robinson from DG Law Limited says she finds that the case, “I think the difference is accessibility, it’s just easy for clients to get to you. You bump into clients at the sports field with your kids, you’re right there in their face!”
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