Our Profession, Our People
25 September 2015 · LawTalk 874
It’s about helping people By Frank Neill “I’ve always wanted to be a lawyer,” Dunedin criminal defender Catherine Ure says. “I told my parents when I was quite young. I was about five or six when I said I was going to be a lawyer. “I think quite realistically at age five or six you don’t have much appreciation of necessarily what a lawyer is or what they do, but it stuck with me. It’s something that I carried through with. Right through high school I was still saying: ‘I want to be a lawyer’.” That was despite the fact that her mother, at one stage, was keen on her becoming a doctor. So Ms Ure left her home in Kaeo, almost at the top of the North Island, to study law at Otago University in Dunedin, almost at the other end of New Zealand. “I ended up getting a job here [in Dunedin] and staying here and I love it.” Now she is one of three Dunedin-based Public Defence Service (PDS) lawyers. What, then, was it that attracted her to the role?
Helping others “I think it’s the perception that being a lawyer is definitely a challenging job. I wanted to do something that is interesting. My motivation now is also about helping people. “It’s about helping people navigate through something – through a period that is very, very difficult for them. It’s not something that most people want to navigate on their own. “At the same time, you are ensuring that you are acting in your client’s best interests and obviously acting in accordance with your professional obligations as a lawyer. “But there are other skills that you can
use to help your clients,” Ms Ure says. As well as representing clients, as a lawyer you frequently pick up other issues, some of which have contributed to the offending. There may, for example, be literacy issues, or drug and alcohol issues, for example. And some of these issues “you can pick up right from the start”. That then gives the defence lawyer
an opportunity to get their client some help, something Ms Ure says should be done “as soon as you can, because you shouldn’t wait until later on to start these things”.
The sooner the better “I don’t think it’s all right to think that you can wait to get help with drug and alcohol issues Continued on next page...
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