President from 1988 to 1990
Phillipa (Pip) Muir is the Chair of Simpson Grierson and is a senior partner in the firm’s Employment Law group.
Pip attended the inaugural meeting of AWLA in 1984 and clearly remembers the occasion – and the influential way senior women in the law spoke that night (particularly Helen Melrose and Dame Sian Elias GNZM KC PC). Pip reflects positively on the beginning of her legal career. Her first role in law was in the small Auckland law firm of Haigh Lyon & Co, working for two prominent litigators, John Haigh KC and Hon. Graeme Colgan. Pip said she was fortunate to work for two male lawyers who were extremely supportive of women in the profession and encouraged her to join organisations like AWLA, that would advance the interests of women in the law.
Pip said that the late John Haigh KC was a huge ally of women and he promoted Pip’s career development, making an effort to introduce her to prominent women lawyers and supporting her to believe in herself as a lawyer. Pip says this experience contrasted to the experience of some of her female peers, who faced significant challenges and misogyny in those times.
After a stint working in the UK, Pip returned to join Simpson Grierson and her firm fully supported (and paid for) her rejoining AWLA and Pip became president of AWLA in 1988.
One significant event that Pip recalls during her time as president, involved initiating a survey of all of the large and medium sized law firms in Auckland, to ascertain how many female partners each firm had. There were no law firm websites then, to identify these statistics, so the AWLA Executive phoned each firm personally. The results painted a grim picture (with one of the large law firms having no female partners at that time) and AWLA’s media release ended up on the front page of the NZ Herald. On a more positive note, Pip recalls this leading to more women lawyers getting involved with AWLA, and law firms taking gender imbalance more seriously.
A notable issue AWLA advocated for, while Pip was on the committee, was for the Government to introduce tax deductibility of childcare expenses. A significant amount of work was dedicated to furthering this issue, but unfortunately, there was no appetite from the Government of the day to progress this.
Pip says that her involvement with AWLA was not only an important time in terms of progressing initiatives to better the experiences of women in the profession, but AWLA also enabled her to make some lifelong female friends in the law, and created many great memories along the way.