News and views

​We’re very proud to announce a couple of major milestones for our Family Law expert, Deb Inder. Deb’s now a member of the New Zealand Law Society’s Panel of Mediators as a Family Specialist, making her one of only three throughout all of Central Otago.

By all accounts, rental properties have dried up as quickly as the vegetation around Wanaka of late - and the accommodation drought has brought with it both out-of-luck prospective tenants and steep rent increases to boot.

Having recently clocked the big 2-0 in my legal career, I started doing a bit of a recreational, back-of-the-envelope tally of how many property transactions I’ve clocked up during that time – I got into the many thousands very quickly, felt old, and stopped.

After a false start and delay in implementation, the modifications to Child Support are now just around the corner, heralding significant changes to the way these payments are calculated. If you’re paying or receiving Child Support, now’s the time to ensure you understand the new regime which comes into force on April 1 2015.

In the lead up to the silly season, most law firms exist in a state of (hopefully) well-managed urgency – a frenetic dash to the finish line that is Christmas, amid a flurry of late-breaking, pressing legal matters that really can’t wait until January.

I read some jaw-dropping stats on a news site recently. Surely, surely they can’t be that high, I mused. I headed straight to the website of the statistical source, Statistics New Zealand, and, sure enough, the rate of injury-based claims to ACC from our high-risk sectors – forestry, agriculture and fishing – was more than sobering.

This Labour weekend in Wanaka sees the annual Wanakafest Day on Saturday 25 October. It will be a fantastic day down on the waterfront (fine weather is forecast) and there will be lots of really fun activities, some of which will include...

Subcontractors owed money are to get better protection for payment for work done in changes to the Construction Contracts Act approved by Government, Building and Construction Minister Dr Nick Smith announced.