Nevill’s Law of Trusts, Wills and Administration, 14th edition

Author Dr Lindsay Breach

Easy to use and written in plain English, Nevill’s Law of Trusts, Wills and Administration includes comprehensive commentary alongside practical tools to assist the reader.

Strongly established as a go-to text for New Zealand trust law, this 14th edition has been significantly restructured and accommodates the changes made to the law since the Trusts Act 2019 came into force. It will be a valuable resource for all those practising or studying the law relating to trusts, wills and administration.

Topics covered include:

■ Types of trusts

■ Administration of trusts

■ Executors and administrators

■ Trustees’ powers and duties

■ General principles relating to wills

■ Succession on intestacy

Price for ADLS members $156.51 plus GST*

Price for non-member lawyers: $173.91 plus GST*

(* + Postage and packaging)

To purchase this book, please visit adls.org.nz; alternatively, contact the ADLS bookstore by phone: (09) 306 5740, fax: (09) 306 5741 or email: thestore@adls.org.nz.

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Three questions

At present, using ChatGPT is free so I registered and asked it a few questions to experiment with how it might be used to prepare summaries of information:

■ First, I asked it, “What is the role of the Auckland District Law Society?” Its instant response was, “The Auckland District Law Society is a professional association for lawyers in Auckland, New Zealand. It was founded in 1857. The society’s main purpose is to ‘promote the administration of justice and the interests of the legal profession.’ It does this by providing services and support to its members, and by advocating for the legal profession and the interests of justice.”

■ Next, I asked it to write a summary of the court system in New Zealand. It responded within a few seconds: “New Zealand’s court system is divided into two branches: the district courts and the High Court. The district courts are the main courts of first instance and deal with most criminal and civil cases. They also hear appeals from some tribunals. The High Court is the highest court in the country and hears appeals from the district courts. It also deals with certain criminal cases and applications for judicial review. All courts in New Zealand are independent from the government and the judiciary is appointed by the Governor-General. The Supreme Court of New Zealand is the final court of appeal for all matters in the country, and its decisions are binding on all lower courts.”

■ I then asked it to add sarcasm and it responded with this addition: “So if you’re looking for justice, you’ve come to the right place! Our court system is the perfect example of efficiency and fairness –unless, of course, you’re a defendant.”

I was impressed. It seems to be like a much smarter version of Google because it doesn’t simply give you links to sources of information – it provides you with the actual summary itself.

In other experiments the summaries were generally accurate although some details were incorrect. But they were errors I see humans get wrong all the time too, like referring to the Charities Commission instead of the current name of Charities Services.

Other developments in this area are interesting. For example, recently in the United States the company DoNotPay, which arose out of an app helping people get off parking fines, has offered US$1 million to anyone willing to allow their AI app to argue a case in the Supreme Court (with it delivering directions to the