Directing the PDS a ‘fascinating role’ by Frank Neill
Brendan Horsley is the newly appointed Deputy Solicitor-General (Criminal), having started in April 2014. He moved to this role from being the first National Director of the Public Defence Service (PDS). The whole concept of the PDS, its expansion, the timing of its expansion and other changes in legal aid made it an interesting time to be the first National Director, he says. Mr Horsley took up the reins as National Director of the PDS around the time the service was about to expand from the Auckland area, where it had been trialled, to cover the country. When he started with the PDS in August 2011, “we had 50 lawyers working for us then. When I finished in April of this year, we had just gone past 140 lawyers working for us. “In that time, we moved from doing about 5,000 cases a year to round about 15,000 cases a year and we spread from Dunedin up to Auckland. “It was a big jump and a significant change to the legal landscape really. “If you treat it [the PDS] like a law firm, it would be one of the biggest and certainly it would be the biggest collection of criminal
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· LawTalk 844 · 20 June 2014
lawyers in the country.” After graduating from Victoria University, Mr Horsley started in a general practitioner role with Burnard Bull in Gisborne in 1992. The work involved “everything from conveyancing to criminal/civil litigation, even debt collection. I always tried to avoid family law though.” In 1995 he moved within Gisborne, going to Crown Solicitor Woodward Iles & Co, as they were known then. “I managed to do a lot of trials with them, as well as a little bit of more general work like employment practice.” A “Wellington boy through and through”, Mr Horsley moved back to the capital in 1999 to begin a three-year stint with the Commerce Commission, prosecuting quasi criminal and criminal offences. “That was great, because it was a different sort of law – that mix of commerce and economics and criminal law all sort of overlaid. It was a pretty fascinating time actually.” In 2001 he started with Crown Law as a Crown Counsel in the criminal team, working under the then Solicitor-General Terrence