Women in the law
4 December 2015 · LawTalk 879
was a foundation director of the New Zealand Law Society Continuing Legal Education Board. She is also a former convenor of the Otago Women Lawyers’ Society (OWLS). Together with her husband, Ms Chan is the owner of Monarch Wildlife Tours and Cruises, which provides guided tours of the Otago peninsula and wildlife.
Tiana Epati Ms Epati is the Law Society’s Gisborne branch President. She is also a member of the Law Society’s Criminal Law Committee, having been appointed to that role in September this year. A criminal defence lawyer, Ms Epati graduated from Auckland University Photo: Gisborne Herald in 2000 with a BA in philosophy and history and an LLB. She began her working life as a lawyer with Meredith Connell in Auckland, where she was a Crown prosecutor for four years. In 2004 she moved to Wellington, working as a Crown prosecutor at Luke Cunningham Clere. She moved from criminal work to working in the public law team at a boutique Wellington law firm on a one-year fixed-term contract. However she found she missed the criminal law work and returned to Luke Cunningham and Clere. After having her first child, she decided she wanted to take a step back from conducting serious criminal trials with a young child, so in 2008 she moved to the Crown Law Office, working in the Criminal Process Team appearing as lead counsel on appeals to the Court of Appeal and as counsel assisting in the Supreme Court. In that role, she appeared as senior appellate counsel in a significant number of appeals against conviction and sentence to the Court of Appeal. Tiana and her family relocated to Gisborne in October 2012. She has been with Rishworth Wall & Mathieson, working mainly as a criminal defence lawyer since then. As well as her criminal specialty, Ms Epati is interested in human rights law, and recently completed a post-graduate intensive paper in human rights litigation at Auckland University. She is the first Gisborne President of Pacifika descent.
Phillipa Muir Ms Muir is a partner at Simpson Grierson in Auckland, where she heads the e mp l oym e nt l aw group. She acts for many of New Zealand’s largest employers and advises on both contentious and non-contentious matters. In both 2012 and 2014, Ms Muir won the Best in Workplace Relations Award at the Australasian Women in Business Awards. 15198 AUCKLAND DEFENCE Ad FIN.indd 1
For a number of years Ms Muir has been recognised internationally as a leading lawyer by Asia Pacific Legal 500, Employment; Chambers Asia-Pacific, Employment; and The International Who’s Who, Legal Labour & Employment/Pensions and Benefits. A board member of Global Employment Law Alliance, Ms Muir also chairs both the Fletcher Building Employee Educational Fund and Auckland Writers Festival and she is on the Board of Trustees of Auckland Grammar School. She is a guest lecturer on employment law at Auckland University’s Law Faculty, and is a co-author of the Thomson Reuters published legal texts Employment Law and Recruitment and Termination. Ms Muir is married with two sons.
Liesle Theron The convenor of the Law Society’s Law Reform Committee, Ms Theron is a partner of Meredith Connell in Wellington. She is a commercial and public law litigator who advises public and private-sector clients across a range of fields and has appeared in courts at all levels, in tribunals, before Select Committees and as junior counsel assisting a Commission of Inquiry. After obtaining a BA from the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, Ms Theron moved to Wellington and in 1999 she graduated as Victoria University’s top law student. She worked as a solicitor for Chapman Tripp from 1999 to 2002. As the 2002 Ethel Benjamin Scholar and a Fulbright Scholar, she studied at New York University, graduating with an LLM in May 2003. While in New York, Ms Theron also worked as an intern at the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Early Warning and Contingency Planning Unit. After she returned to New Zealand, she worked as in-house counsel at Telecom New Zealand Ltd, before joining Thorndon Chambers where she worked as a barrister from 2004 until she moved to Meredith Connell in 2014. She is a contributing author of Professional Responsibility in New Zealand, Morison’s Company Law and Heath & Whale on Insolvency, and author of Guide to Company Liquidation (all published by LexisNexis). She has six children and step-children between the ages of 4 and 28. ▪
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