I am a partner at Piper Alderman, specialising in insolvency and commercial litigation.

I graduated with a BA/LLB from Victoria University of Wellington in 2002, before moving to Sydney to commence practice in 2003. I worked for 13 years in a small city practice specialising in criminal law, conveyancing, business disputes and insolvency, before moving to Piper Alderman in 2016.

I currently head up a small team of lawyers at Piper Alderman, where we occupy our days with a mix of general commercial litigation, insolvency advice and assistance to the directors of companies in financial distress, and advice and claims work for company liquidators, administrators and receivers.

I am also deeply involved with the Law Society. Over my 20+ years of practice, I have served on several Law Society Committees – initially the Young Lawyers’ Civil Litigation Committee, and later Business Law, Costs, Professional Conduct, Ethics and Disclosure. I also sit on the Insolvency & Reconstruction Committee of the Law Council of Australia, and am a Fellow of ARITA, the industry body for insolvency professionals.

I have also served as a mentor to several young lawyers through formal mentoring programmes offered by the Law Society and by the “Asian Leadership Project” – an initiative established in 2017 to fast-track diverse Asian talent into leadership. I firmly believe that good mentoring can have a profound impact on a young lawyer’s development (and professional trajectory). I was fortunate to be the beneficiary of superb mentoring in my first years as a young lawyer.

In my spare time, I volunteer with my local women’s shelter – the Hornsby Ku-ring-gai Women’s Shelter. I encourage readers to learn more about the Shelter at www.hkws.org.au. It is a magnificent community institution. It has enjoyed (and continues to enjoy) the support of many volunteers from our profession.

Outside work, I am a father to two teenagers, and my personal passion is cars – I am the proud owner of one of Australia’s last home-grown cars – a 2017 Holden Commodore which, in my spare time, I drive for Uber, just for a laugh and to take a break from more onerous duties as lawyer and husband/father. I also enormously enjoy racing it at Bathurst once a year, but am yet to break any track records.

I have chosen to run for Council because I enjoy getting involved with the profession. I am a regular attendee at CPDs and other events put on by the North Metropolitan Law Society (my local Regional Law Society), and have, for many years, enjoyed serving on the Law Society’s many policy and statutory committees. I enjoy the work, and I like the people.

It is absolutely vital that the profession is represented, through the Law Society Council, by practitioners who are at the coal face of work as lawyer, who live the stressful lives most of us lead, who have their finger on the pulse of the profession, and who are across emerging problems, issues and grumbles.

I have found that many things are made unnecessarily hard for lawyers, particularly in the field of costs disclosure and client engagement. A focus if I am elected will be ameliorate the harshness of the consequences that ensue where a lawyer has failed to comply with a costs disclosure requirement, something I have previously written about in the Law Society Journal (when it was a monthly publication, received in the mail in hard copy – something else I would like to see again).

I seek your support for my election to Council in 2024. I would be proud to be one of your voices on Council.