Welcome to My Net Worth, our regular column on the lives and motivations of our country’s top business, legal and political people in their own words.
Jacque Lethbridge is the third consecutive female president of the New Zealand Law Society but only the fifth in its 153-year history. Her career spans 20 years, from working at the Waitangi Tribunal in Wellington, pre-graduation, to her present position as a litigation partner at Martelli McKegg in Auckland. In the intervening years, her work covered many areas of legal practice, including criminal law (Ministry of Social Development and the Public Defence Service), civil and commercial law (Grove Darlow, where at age 32 she was made the first female partner), and restructuring and insolvency litigation (Lowndes). Raised in Horowhenua and Rangitikei, she did her tertiary studies at Victoria University of Wellington, where she gained a BA in history and political science and an LLB. Eight years later, at the University of Auckland, she received an LLM (Hons), for which she studied while continuing to practise law. She has given years of voluntary service to the legal fraternity on its professional bodies, and is the current chair of the Auckland Community Law Centre board.
My happiest memories are of coming back from church every Sunday. We would have what we called Sunday dinner, but it was at lunchtime, with a complete menagerie of people, often some who were total strangers, but really interesting characters, and always with my wider family. I loved that.
As a young child I was quite precocious and inquisitive, but also kind of off in my own imaginary world. I wouldn't call myself a high achiever until my last two years of school, when it all seemed to come together.
I nearly failed School Certificate, and my parents, particularly my father, said, “What are you doing?”
I wanted to be a doctor. But in my intermediate years, I started doing school speeches, and competitions, and I did well on those.
Somebody said to me – and I can't even tell you who; it might have been a teacher or family friend – “If you've done well in that speech competition, you should think about being a lawyer.” So that's kind of where it started.
My son Harry was only seven months old when I got admitted to the bar. I started doing more and more work involving sex trials, and some significant murder trials, and it just became obvious that there was a real shortness of runway for me and the criminal law. There were hardly any women at the senior end of criminal law.
Jacque Lethbridge, with son Harry, on her admission to the bar in 2004.
Michael Corry [New Zealand’s first public defender] said to me, “Look, you should be getting into civil”, so I did a master’s degree and got an opportunity because Grove Darlow were looking for someone and the global financial crisis had just hit, meaning there was lots of insolvency work.
Harry had to go into full-time daycare at three months old, which I still look back on now and sort of cringe, to be honest. But I needed to earn money.
The only way I got through it was with family support. My brother, who was only 22, left his flat to come and live with Harry and me so we could afford a decent place.
When I look back now, I probably put a bit too much pressure on myself to climb as quickly as I could. I was really driven to give Harry the best life that I could. When I was young, I felt a real sense of responsibility to make sure he was financially set.
I'm very determined. And I'm very passionate about what I do. But I'm also someone who likes to have fun. I have made sure throughout my career, and in life generally, that I've had fun along the way.
I like to spend the weekends decompressing with my partner, Sergio – and Harry, when he'll see me. He’s now 18.
I like spending time with my family and my friends. Breaking bread together, getting around a table. I think my friends would say I'm an avid debater around the dinner table.
I want my biggest success to be bringing other female partners through the legal system. I have always wanted to create meaningful change by doing it myself.
My biggest disappointment probably is that I didn't take more time to step back. Particularly, you know, with Harry. I put a lot of pressure on myself to sort of be everything to everyone, including with my family.
The biggest misconception about lawyering is that it’s glamorous. Ultimately, it’s a service industry. Your time is not your own.
You are there to help people, whether it's from a major commercial transaction, right through to something like an urgent protection order because someone's suffering from domestic violence. That's people at their absolute worst.
I’m a big shoe person. I think my career has tracked along with Kathryn Wilson’s. It comes back to my dad. He was in a wheelchair for 42 years but he instilled in us that it wasn’t so much the shoes that you wear but the way you wear your shoes – always polished, always clean and tidy. That was really important, and spoke a lot to the kind of person you were.
As told to Victoria Young.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
