In-house role & ethics with Alexandra Birt

SHIFT Lawyer Alexandra Birt has recently been named one of NZ Lawyer Magazine’s Future Legal Leaders for 2026. Here, she reflects on her standout session from the recent ILANZ conference and why a thought-provoking discussion on legal ethics challenged the way she thinks about the role of in-house lawyers – not just as business advisors, but as agents of the rule of law.

Lawyer – aka Agents of the Rule of Law

I’ll be honest: when I scanned the programme for the In-House Lawyers’ Conference in Wellington and saw the first session was on legal ethics, my first instinct wasn’t to circle it enthusiastically. Ethics sessions have a reputation – worthy, important, perhaps a little dry. I went along dutifully.

It turned out to be the session I found most valuable of the entire conference.

Professor Stephen Vaughan, Dean of the Faculty of Law at Monash University in Melbourne, opened with a question that set the tone immediately: “Who are you as a person, and why do you do the things you do?” What followed was less a lecture and more a genuinely uncomfortable, genuinely useful exercise in self-examination.

Lawyer, or business advisor?

Professor Vaughan shared research in which lawyers were asked how they primarily identified themselves – as a lawyer, a business advisor, or something else. The finding that stuck with me: those who identified more as business advisors also tended to score worse on ethical questions. It sounds counterintuitive at first, but his point landed clearly. When you’re in-house, it’s very easy to slip into a mindset of “I work for the business, the business comes first.” That thinking, while understandable, represents a misunderstanding of our role as lawyers.

We are officers of the High Court. Our duties extend beyond the client sitting across the table from us or down the corridor. We are, as Professor Vaughan put it, agents of the rule of law. That phrase kept coming back throughout his talk, and it’s stayed with me since.

When lawyers end up in the front seat

To illustrate what goes wrong when lawyers lose sight of this, Professor Vaughan walked through some of the major public scandals of recent years – the UK Post Office scandal, Robodebt, Crown Casino, among others. The common thread was not that lawyers were absent from these situations. Quite the opposite: in many cases, lawyers were deeply involved. The problem was how they were involved and what they chose to do, or to ignore.

In the Post Office scandal in particular, lawyers weren’t playing a supporting, advisory role. They were in the front seat, actively shaping decisions, with a deeply misconceived sense of duty to their client overriding everything else. In the Robodebt and Crown Casino cases, the failure took a different form: in-house lawyers who had become passive, who had lost their professional independence, and who allowed wrongdoing to continue unchallenged around them.

In both patterns, the over-zealous advocate and the silent bystander, the lawyers had stopped being agents of the rule of law. They had let their professional ethos erode.

Legal, yes. But is it right?

One of the most practically useful things Professor Vaughan offered was a reminder to ask a question that is deceptively simple: Something might be legal, but is it right? Is it honest? Does it thwart the purpose of the law?

Our role, he argued, isn’t just to provide technical legal advice. It extends into moral counsel, because that is what our duty as officers of the court actually demands. The question isn’t only “can we do this?” but “should we?”

What I’ve taken away

I’ve thought about legal ethics more in the weeks since the conference than I have in a long time (probably since my mandatory ethics course at university). Thinking about what is right, what is moral, has reframed decisions that might otherwise feel like straightforward legal analysis. It’s a small shift in posture, but I think it’s a meaningful one.

I’d encourage anyone who gets the opportunity to hear Professor Vaughan speak to take it. And I’d suggest that the next time you see “legal ethics” on a conference programme, you resist the urge to skip it, particularly if the person delivering it is willing to ask the uncomfortable questions first.