14 minute read
Finding Your Way
Aedeen Boadita-Cormican*
This piece is not a career roadmap - anyone who knows me will tell you I have no sense of direction. Nor does it contain tips or recommendations. Rather, I am sharing my story in case it may prompt self-reflection on the part of life that is your career. We each find our way to where we are now in our own time, at our own pace and with our own motivations. For me, kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua - I walk backwards into the future, looking to my past.
Ko Aedeen Boadita-Cormican toku ingoa. My name reflects my whakapapa to Ireland and India. It reveals part of the story of my formative years.
My parents named me Aedeen de Socorro Boadita. Éadaoín (anglicised Aedeen) is a character from Irish mythology. Santa María do Socorro is a chapel in my father’s village in Goa. Boadita is my paternal family name.
My father was Goan, born in Uganda where my grandfather worked in the British civil service and my grandmother’s family had a cotton milling business. My parents met in Belfast, in the north of Ireland. I am their only child.
My father died when I was a year old. Mum was in her mid-twenties. Over the next two years we soaked up great love and support from family and friends in Ireland and in India, where we travelled to spend extended time with my father’s family, most of whom we had only known up until then through letters and telegrams.
Mum was from Dublin, but we lived in Hillsborough, a predominantly protestant area in the north of Ireland, which is part of the UK. Until 2022, the Irish language was not recognised and protected in the UK. This lends some significance to the name of our house in Hillsborough: Ó Chualann – Irish for The Sugar Loaf Mountain in Dublin – my maunga.
My earliest role models were strong, independent women: my mother, my maternal grandmother, and a woman from Hillsborough who defied community pressure not to work for “that catholic widow-woman with the black child” to mind me while Mum was at work.
My mother met and married my stepfather - my dad –when I was three. Dad is from Belfast, but was working in Lima, Peru. Mum and I joined him there. Our little family was known by Dad’s surname, Cormican.
The local British school in Lima rejected my enrolment, telling my parents I was “educationally subnormal and visually illiterate.” An interesting diagnosis based on 15 minutes with a 4-year-old. My mother was dismayed but Dad thought it was a lucky break. He was right. I attended a local school and then a German Montessori school, along the way acquiring an ear for languages and absorbing Latino culture.
We returned to Ireland when I was six - not back to Hillsborough but to Dublin, closer to Mum’s whānau, and further away from The Troubles in the north of Ireland.
I took from those formative years my mother’s mantra that “you make your own luck”. I read luck as choice in the response to life events. At seventeen I made one small, but lasting, choice, changing my name by deed poll to Aedeen Boadita-Cormican, because Cormican was not my legal surname.
I studied law at Trinity College Dublin. I had applied not expecting I would be accepted. Suddenly, there I was, with full blown imposter syndrome – feeling totally intimidated by my smart, confident classmates. With great encouragement from tutors, I kept going.
My lecturers included the extraordinary Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese - working mothers, superb lawyers, and great leaders. Mary Robinson later became the first woman President of Ireland and was succeeded as President by Mary McAleese. They showed where equal opportunity can lead in our profession. I have never lost sight of that vision.
While an undergraduate, I travelled and worked in the USA in the holidays. I got my first paid law job in Boston USA. Like a character in a 1980s song, “I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar when I met… [a customer who offered me a job as a law clerk]” (hmmm, not that catchy a tune!). I had also been to the USA as part of the Ireland team in the Jessup Public International Law moot a couple of times. I was thrilled by the USA and considered postgraduate study there but when I was offered a place to do the LLM at Cambridge University in England I chose that opportunity.
Cambridge was a major interchange on the life highway - a wonderful year learning and meeting people from all over the world, which gave me new-found confidence. I wanted the challenge of a big pool and decided to qualify in England. With the help of a bank loan and an award from Gray’s Inn, I enrolled in the Bar Vocational Course in London.
A sign of those times is that the Advocacy module of the Bar Vocational Course encouraged received pronunciation, the so-called ‘standard’ English pronunciation. This seemed to me to be ironing out rather than celebrating difference but, with that exception, I found the course practical and enjoyable. The process leading to admission required dining at your Inn – a form of networking, although nobody used that term then. I teamed up with fellow students at Gray’s Inn to eat our way to admission. The food was, well, English, but it was a great way to connect with others also encountering the edifice of the English bar for the first time.
With exams done, and dinners consumed, I was called to the bar in 1990. That same year my Kiwi boyfriend and I got married and I visited New Zealand for the first time.
The final stage of qualification as a barrister in England is pupillage. Most pupillages were unpaid but some chambers offered awards. I couldn’t afford to self-fund a pupillage so I decided to take time to save and learn the lie of the land before applying. I returned to my love of public international law, working at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law for a year.
I secured a funded pupillage at 3 Essex Court. It was another world. Essex Court is part way down the cobble-stoned Middle Temple Lane. The clerks referred to barristers as “Sir” and “Miss” but this seeming deference belied their power to make or break a career. Those were the days when wigs and gowns were required for most hearings, suits had to be black or navy blue (and most definitely not brown), and women were required to wear skirts, not trousers. There were traditions about what the type of court attire a barrister could wear when walking from chambers to the Royal Courts, depending on which Inn of Court they were walking from. I had a lot to learn.
My first pupil mistress impressively juggled a busy practice and family and helped me believe this was possible at the bar. I worked on a bailment case with her, heard at the High Court sitting in Newcastle. This was unusual work for chambers which specialised in dry shipping work involving arbitrations and senior court hearings. The American clients had a friend who drove us around in a Rolls Royce with white furry seats and offered to translate the English spoken by the locals.
There was little knockabout court-work for pupils, but much to learn from smart commercial lawyers like my next pupil master, who had moved from South Africa to England to study law and went on to become a QC, a Judge of the High Court and a Court of Appeal Judge. On Day 1, he insisted on learning how to pronounce my name correctly. Nobody had done that for me before.
My pupil-master believed, more than I did myself, that I had a future at the bar. When chambers didn’t offer me a tenancy, he encouraged me to apply to other chambers. A salaried job as a solicitor beckoned and the financial uncertainty of the junior bar was daunting. This was a potential turning point. Without his encouragement I wouldn’t have persevered.
I was interviewed for a potential tenancy at chambers where there were no women barristers. Searching for a common interest to discuss with a kid from Dublin, my interviewers hit on cricket, mentioned on my CV because I had played (badly, but with great enthusiasm) at school and university. The conversation flowed, and I was in! I sometimes reflect on the randomness of this, and on the ripple effect when one person gets to demystify the ‘otherness’ they represent.
Chambers was at 1 Crown Office Row with an ‘annex’ on Middle Temple Lane where most of the juniors were located, a short trip across the cobblestones to the Middle Temple bar and library – equally popular destinations. I had yet to appear in court on my own and, with the unenviable job of marketing my inexperience while also trying to pronounce my name, my clerk suggested I use my married name: “Why not Lawson Miss? Lawson’s a nice name - and so much easier!” I metaphorically raised my NO sign.
I spent a whole weekend preparing for my first hearing – a simple List appearance. Heart racing, I stuttered my over-rehearsed lines in a court-room full of other barristers, imagining them critiquing my efforts when they were probably just reading their own notes. I was convinced I had chosen the wrong career – there was no way this amount of stress was sustainable.
I pressed on. Briefs arrived tied with a ribbon and marked with the fee set by the clerk. For fifty quid I could appear before a District Judge; double that for a small interlocutory; a substantial brief fee with daily refreshers for a civil trial. With each appearance the nerves lessened and my skills grew.
I went over the road to the Royal Courts of Justice for High Court matters and travelled the length and breadth of England by train, appearing in the County Courts, magistrates’ courts, and at inquests. I made mistakes that still make me cringe - but I learned. I even appeared before the Privy Council occasionallynano-appearances requiring no greater skill than the ability to robe correctly and bow. Access was gained simply by showing the brief to the policeman at the gate to Downing Street. How times have changed.
By 1995, the Bar Council in England was actively supporting diversity and inclusion. I had been volunteered as our chambers Equality Officer and worked on initiatives to broaden access to the bar. But there was no standard for parental leave when our first child was born in 1995 so I negotiated a three-month rent break. My husband was working for a law firm in the city and the prospect of parenting while maintaining two busy legal practices was not attractive. On a whim, my husband applied for and was offered a job in Kuwait. We decided to give it a go – just for a year…. Chambers agreed to a sabbatical, I hired a nanny and briefly returned to work at the end of my rent break, to tie up loose ends.
Kuwait was another major interchange. Our planned one year there became thirteen. I took up a legal role at Kuwait Petroleum Corporation in the office of the Chief Financial Officer, who was also Kuwait’s Governor at OPEC. An intelligent woman, reputed to have a low tolerance for fools, she was devoted to her career, challenging stereotypes about the role of women in the Middle East.
My first job was to work on discovery and expert evidence, and liaise with London lawyers on an English High Court case – all well within my comfort zone. When that work finished, I was asked to assist with a European cross-border M&A transaction, the first of its kind. External law firms were leading the work but my professional learning curve was a near-vertical wall that I needed a full set of suction cups to climb. Further corporate transactions followed, and I was lucky also to work on international gas sales agreements, double taxation agreements, OPEC procedures, and a London commercial property purchase, to mention just a few.
Meanwhile our young family was growing. I attempted to negotiate a part-time contract to have more time to be the mother I wanted to be to our young children. When I was told part-time was not an option, I resigned. Some months later the CFO asked me to come back… part-time, of course.
We enjoyed our time in Kuwait – the people, the culture, the language, travel opportunities, work-life balance. Of course, like anywhere, it was not without its challenges, and we did not see our future there as a family. We decided to move to New Zealand, and did so in late 2008.
To be admitted in New Zealand I needed to pass the New Zealand Law and Practice examinations. I got back to swotting like an undergrad and was admitted in New Zealand in 2010. A lucky break gave me a fixed term role at Crown Law which, in turn, led to a secondment to Maritime New Zealand. Then, Crown Law offered me a role on the team supporting the government’s participation in the Royal Commission on the Pike River Mine Tragedy. The role was quite junior, but I could see the potential to learn. I had been deeply moved by the Pike River Mine tragedy and was keen to play my part. It is one of the great privileges of my working life to have been involved in that work.
I loved my time at Crown Law but, by 2015, I was ready for another challenge. I found it at ACC, in the newly created role of General Counsel and Company Secretary. This was another steep learning curve for me. Beyond accident compensation law issues, litigation and reviews, the legal team supported the investment function, the levy-setting process, as well as injury prevention, property, procurement, IT and contracting functions, and a major project to transform case management.
By 2019 I felt it was ‘now or never’ to give the bar another go. I booked the Stepping Up Course and, keen for another challenge in the meantime, started a short secondment as Acting Treasury Solicitor. The COVID-19 pandemic led to my secondment being extended. I enjoy challenge, but this was next level, involving seemingly relentless, rapidly developing, and novel workstreams. I am humbled by the incredible work done at the time by unsung heroes in the public service, many of them in my teams.
After almost a year at Treasury I returned to ACC briefly before moving to the bar. I also qualified as a chartered member of the NZ Institute of Directors to add another string to my bow.
The New Zealand bar is a happy place for me. I have had a wonderfully varied range of legal work so far, thoroughly enjoy governance and have the flexibility to give time to other interests.
Looking back, it strikes me how much I owe much to the encouragement of others, only some of whom are mentioned here. As for the future - I can only say I still love a challenge and my fear of missing out always trumps my fear of failure.
Perhaps there will be more adventures.
