New Entrant – Natalie Coates, partner at Kāhui Legal has two first class honours degrees and a post-graduate degree from Harvard.

But her academic achievements are not what brings her to the Power List as a new entrant but rather her New Zealand legal-making achievement in September when the Supreme Court allowed former Christchurch Civic Creche worker Peter Ellis’s appeal against charges of sexual offending to continue, despite the fact he died in September last year.

It will be the first time in Aotearoa that a conviction is appealed by a dead person.

Whakatane-based Coates was a lecturer at Auckland University Faculty of Law, where she taught the Treaty of Waitangi, jurisprudence, tikanga and the law, legal ethics and law and society.

Former wife of Labour list MP, commercial lawyer and business consultant Kiri Allan she had also worked with Annette Sykes and Miharo Armstrong, before he was appointed a judge of the Māori Land Court in 2014.

“My ultimate ambition is to help built up the jurisprudence in relation to tikanga and the Treaty and help move the needle in respect of those things. In a way that is already happening and I want to contribute to that development in a meaningful way.

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