NZ Law’s Power Lawyer List 2025
By John Bowie, LawFuel Publisher |
Another year, another crop of legal luminaries jockeying for recognition. But the LawFuel Power List has never been interested in who has the best website copy or the most earnest diversity statement. We’re interested in something considerably less polite: who actually wields power in New Zealand law?
Not influence in the abstract, PR-friendly sense. Real power. The kind that shapes legislation before it reaches Parliament, steers regulatory investigations before they become public, determines which billion-dollar transactions proceed and which collapse, and decides which alleged frauds become prosecutions and which quietly disappear.
The 2025 LawFuel Power List delivers its usual cocktail of institutional heavyweights, courtroom titans, regulatory shock troops, and a few strategists whose influence is quiet but devastatingly real. It’s opinionated, occasionally provocative, and guaranteed to irritate at least some of the people who matter. Which is rather the point.
The Paradox at the Top: Una Jagose’s Enduring Gravity
One of the most striking features of this year’s list is also its most contentious – Una Jagose retains the number one position despite announcing her departure as Solicitor-General in February 2026 and despite calls for her removal by survivors of the abuse in care Inquiry. To the literal-minded, this may seem perverse, but to those who understands how institutional power actually operates, it’s entirely defensible.
Jagose isn’t merely vacating an office, she’s concluding a tenure that has helped recalibrate the relationship between Crown Law, the political executive, and the broader public law ecosystem.
Her influence extends beyond her exit date through the Crown positions she’s shaped, the precedents she’s defended and the institutional culture she’s embedded across the state legal system.
HR timelines or tidy succession charts survive announcements of departure in terms of relevance and influence.
She remains the first woman to hold the role since 1867. That would be merely symbolic were it not accompanied by a track record of steering Crown litigation through Treaty settlements, pandemic-era constitutional turbulence, and the most politically fraught public law challenges in a generation.
The LawFuel Power List acknowledges what the profession already knows – resignation has not yet translated into reduced relevance.
New Blood and the Generational Shift
The Power List is no longer the ‘boys’ club’. It is is not your father’s legal elite, and the 2025 list makes no pretense otherwise. A substantial cohort of recently elevated KCs appears alongside the traditional pantheon, not as tokens of generational change but as lawyers whose practices have expanded to occupy the high-stakes territory where commercial disputes become constitutional crises, criminal law bleeds into regulatory enforcement, and inquiries become career-defining mandates.
Names like Tiana Epati KC, Christine Meechan KC, (pictured) and Simon Foote KC reflect the bar’s evolution and the generational change with lawyers who are handling the work that shapes industries, careers, constitutional issues and legal precedent.
The new guard brings expertise in inquiries and investigations, white-collar crisis litigation, Pacific leadership and diversity advocacy, and commercial disputes with billion-dollar consequences. They sit alongside and increasingly overshadow the older statespeople whose long litigation mileage still commands attention but whose monopoly on influence is quietly dimishing.
Women and the Quiet Recalibration of Power
Women occupy 22 spaces in the list of 50, including six of the top 10 positions. Their presence isn’t window dressing—it’s the recalibration of where serious legal power resides in 2025.
2025 LawFuel Power List
Women now occupy some of the most structurally powerful positions in New Zealand law. Not as diversity hires or token appointments, but as the people holding the pens, warrants, budgets and litigation files that determine outcomes across every consequential legal domain.
Women occupy 22 spaces in the list of 50, including six of the top 10 positions. Their presence isn’t window dressing—it’s the recalibration of where serious legal power resides in 2025.
From Una Jagose at the top to regulators like Karen Chang (SFO), Anne Callinan (Commerce Commission), and Margot Gatland (FMA), from Crown Solicitors Alysha McClintock and Natalie Walker to legislative architect Cassie Nicholson (Chief Parliamentary Counsel) and revenue guardian Michelle Redington (IRD Chief Tax Counsel) – women are embedded across the institutional machinery that actually runs the legal system.
This isn’t representation for its own sake. These are lawyers whose decisions determine corporate survival, ministerial careers, and whether entire industries face existential regulatory risk.
The Old Guard: Still Relevant, Increasingly Sharing Space
Experience hasn’t become irrelevant, obviously. there are heavyweight litigators and intellects like legal legend Jim Farmer KC with long litigation mileage, institutional memory, and fluency in precedent and who still command influence that younger practitioners cannot yet match.
Veterans like Jim Farmer, Jack Hodder KC, Chris Finlayson KC and others appear not as nostalgic tributes but as working practitioners whose decades of high level Court arguments, Treaty negotiations and constitutional battles give them credibility and client briefs that billing rates alone cannot explain.
But the list also reflects an uncomfortable but not unexpected truth for the old guard in that they’re increasingly sharing space with a generation whose expertise in these and other areas is now to be shared widely. The profession is changing, and the power list changes with it.
The Regulators: Unglamorous, Unavoidable, Powerful
Some of the list’s most consequential figures never argue in court but wield power that dwarfs most litigators. Lawyers like former Lawyer of the Year (2020) Cassie Nicholson are power lawyers who are also largely behind the scenes and away from the courts. They draft the legislation everyone must follow. They decide which alleged frauds become prosecutions. They determine whether your merger proceeds or dies, whether your industry survives regulatory scrutiny, whether your financial institution faces public humiliation.
These are not supporting characters. They are often the main event—lawyers whose structural authority, persistence, and immunity to courtroom drama make them more influential than the silks who grab headlines. The list treats them accordingly, placing bureaucrats beside barristers and regulators alongside rainmakers, because in the real world of legal power, that’s where they belong.
What Power Actually Means (And Why We’re Probably Wrong About Some of It)
Let’s be candid about methodology. Power isn’t a metric you can measure with calipers or extract from billing data. It’s a contested, contextual, constantly renegotiated assessment of who actually matters when outcomes are determined. The LawFuel Power List is an argued-through editorial construct that mixes institutional analysis with reputational assessment, objective authority with subjective influence.
Factors explicitly weighed:
- Institutional muscle: Solicitor-General, agency heads, regulators with statutory teeth
- Courtroom outcomes: Verdicts and precedents that reshape industries
- Regulatory design: Drafting the rules everyone else must follow
- Market influence: GCs and boutique firms moving money and policy
- Crisis mandates: Who gets called when it all goes wrong
- Political proximity: Access to Cabinet and ministerial decisions
- Reputation networks: Who listens when they speak
This explains why a Chief Parliamentary Counsel appears beside an SFO CEO, why a Crown Solicitor ranks near a market watchdog, and why a couples litigation specialist with unmatched courtroom presence sits not far from the regulatory enforcement chief. Influence isn’t tidy. This list doesn’t pretend otherwise.
We also acknowledge that power shifts quickly. Electoral cycles, commissions of inquiry, scandals, regulatory reviews and class actions can propel a lawyer from obscurity to prominence overnight – or quietly retire them from relevance.
The 2025 List reflects both continuity and flux – new entrants with fresh warrants alongside long-time players whose names have appeared in Supreme Court judgments and front-page disasters for decades.
Why This Matters (Even If You Despise Rankings)
Legal judgment isn’t only delivered in courtrooms. It’s written in Cabinet papers that become laws, in memos that save ministerial careers, in contracts that structure billion-dollar transactions, in quiet phone calls that prevent corporate strategy and in regulatory decisions that end careers before they reach the media.
“Influence is often invisible until it’s too late to ignore. The lawyer you’ve never heard of who drafts the legislation you must comply with has more power than the KC whose name appears in headlines.”
This list attempts to capture that messy, contested, occasionally brutal reality. It’s anchored to what the legal world actually responds to: authority, results, networks, narrative control, and impact. These are the lawyers shaping the issues the profession cares about—from fraud enforcement to Crown litigation, from market oversight to Treaty jurisprudence, from regulatory architecture to the quiet work of parliamentary drafting.
What the Power List Reveals About the Profession
Step back from individual rankings, and the 2025 Power List reveals more than just who sits where, but provides a snapshot of a profession in transition. Women aren’t just represented in decent numbers in the List but are embedded in positions of genuine authority. New KCs aren’t merely ceremonial additions; they’re handling the inquiry, regulatory and hybrid work that defines modern legal practice. Regulators aren’t footnotes and are often more powerful than the courtroom stars who dominate media.
The list also exposes the profession’s persistent fault lines. Institutional power still trumps courtroom brilliance in many rankings. Wellington’s policy and regulatory corridors often matter more than Auckland’s commercial litigation strongholds. Quiet, structural power – the ability to draft legislation, approve prosecutions, or handle billion-dollar transactions frequently outweighs headline-grabbing courtroom victories.
This is New Zealand law in 2025: less homogeneous than a decade ago, more regulatory and inquiry-focused than purely litigious, increasingly influenced by women in positions of genuine authority, and shaped as much by bureaucrats and regulators as by courtroom advocates. The Power List simply makes that reality explicit.
Final Thoughts: The Argument Continues
Power lists are inherently subjective exercises masquerading as objective assessments. We’re under no illusions otherwise. What the LawFuel Power List offers is not unchallengeable truth but informed argument—a seriously researched, occasionally provocative assessment of who genuinely matters when legal outcomes are determined in 2025.
Some names on the list will seem obvious. Others will prompt raised eyebrows and irritated emails. A few will make you wonder whether there is a parallel universe. That’s the nature of ranking power though. It’s contested, contextual, and guaranteed to annoy almost everyone in different ways.
But here’s what we’re confident about: the lawyers on this list—whether at the top or further down, whether established titans or rising specialists—are the ones shaping legal outcomes, moving policy needles, and determining what the law actually means when it matters. They’re not always the most famous, the most quoted, or the best at LinkedIn self-promotion. But they’re the ones who matter when everything is on the line.
Will you disagree with some rankings? Undoubtedly. Will you spot omissions? Almost certainly. That’s rather the point. Power lists aren’t stenography; they’re arguments. And if this List provokes more disagreement than consensus, it’s doing exactly what it should.
We’re always ready for feedback. So email us: lawfuel@gmail.com.
