About ALSA Auckland
Building a profession ready for the future.
ALSA Auckland exists because the legal profession needs lawyers who are confident, competent, and culturally fluent. We are building the structures that produce them.
ALSA Auckland exists because the legal profession needs lawyers who are confident, competent, and culturally fluent. We are building the structures that produce them.
The same pattern keeps emerging. New Zealand is one of the most diverse countries in the world. Auckland is one of the most diverse cities. And yet the further up the legal profession you look, the less that diversity is reflected. The pipeline narrows at every stage. It is a structural outcome that accumulates over years, and one the profession itself has begun to name. ALSA was built to address it from the student end.
What capable students are missing is rarely ability. It is infrastructure: visible pathways into the profession, mentors who have walked the same road, and a community where their background is a professional asset rather than something to manage around. A place to stand in the same rooms as anyone else, not despite who they are but because of it.
ALSA was built to provide exactly that. It is an independent incorporated society, not a cultural club: a professional platform, structured and credible, anchored in the skills and relationships that turn capability into career.
"The lawyers we are building relationships with today are the colleagues, the mentors, and the advocates we will rely on for the rest of our careers."
Jayden Lin, Founding President
ALSA did not arrive fully formed. It was built by 17 people who committed to the vision before there was anything to show for it, from a standing start: no university funding, no club room, no inherited membership. Every member, sponsor, and speaker was earned.
ALSA started in December 2025 with a single observation. For all the communities Asian students had built at law school, none were aimed at the hardest part: the transition into the profession itself. The more Jayden looked, the clearer it became that what held capable students back was not ability. It was visibility and access, the simple fact of not being seen by the people who shape legal careers. ALSA was built to close that gap.
It moved quickly. Within months ALSA had a constitution, a 17-person executive, and incorporation as a society. It passed 200 members and secured sponsorships with established brands, including Anytime Fitness. In April 2026 it held its Inaugural Launch Event, headlined by Mai Chen, President of NZ Asian Lawyers. None of it existed a year before.
Gabriel was there before ALSA had infrastructure, members, or certainty. He led the operational delivery of the Inaugural Launch Night and managed the internal team through the early stages of formation.
Anthony handled the foundational work that made ALSA a real institution. He set up the bank account, managed the incorporation process, and built the financial infrastructure the organisation runs on.
ALSA's founding is grounded in evidence, not anecdote. The research on Asian communities in Aotearoa's legal system is clear: the gap between representation at entry level and representation in senior positions is real, persistent, and structural.
The NZ Law Society's Snapshot of the Profession 2024 records Asian lawyers at 11.9% of the profession overall but 19.4% of those in their first seven years of practice, down from 22.7% the year before. More Asian lawyers left that early-career cohort in 2024 than joined it. For context, Asian New Zealanders make up 17.3% of the population at the 2023 Census: the junior cohort enters above that share, while the profession as a whole sits well below it. Asian students enter law in strong numbers. The challenge is making that entry-level strength last into senior practice, and that is precisely what ALSA is built to support.
Source: NZ Law Society Snapshot 2024 →A 2023 NZ Asian Lawyers stocktake found that members had experienced unconscious bias in professional and workplace settings, the kind of barrier that does not show up in headline numbers but quietly shapes who stays and who progresses. The findings came from Asian lawyers reporting on their own experiences across firms and chambers, not from outside commentary. These are findings the profession has produced about itself, raised publicly alongside the Law Society, and is now actively working to address.
Source: NZ Asian Lawyers stocktake, 2023 →Mai Chen's report Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Parties in the Courts, supported by the New Zealand Law Foundation, the Borrin Foundation, and the Ministry of Justice, was a landmark study of the barriers facing culturally and linguistically diverse parties in New Zealand's courts. Auckland is more superdiverse than cities such as London and New York, and a growing share of court matters now involve parties from Asian backgrounds. The report made wide-ranging recommendations, including cross-cultural training for lawyers and the judiciary, a cultural bench book for the courts, and mentoring to grow the profession's cultural capability. Competence here is not a soft skill. It is a condition of equal access to justice.
Source: Mai Chen, CALD Parties in the Courts →In November 2023, Chief Justice Dame Helen Winkelmann joined NZ Asian Lawyers and the Law Society for a joint seminar on the issues facing Asian lawyers and Asian parties in the courts. Former Governor-General Sir Anand Satyanand and members of the judiciary took part. The conversation is happening at the highest levels of the profession, but it has so far been led by practitioners and judges. ALSA is the student-facing response to it, built to operate in parallel with the structural work the profession is already beginning to do, and to make sure the next generation is ready to carry it forward.
Source: LawTalk Issue 956 →"Lawyers need to have not just IQ and EQ; they have got to build their cultural capability of CQ, which is the ability to deal with people who are not like them."
Mai Chen, President of NZ Asian LawyersALSA Auckland is built to last and to grow. Over time, we want to explore with Asian law student organisations at other New Zealand universities whether a national layer could support shared resources, speaker relationships, standards, and a professional community that extends beyond any single university.
The longer-term ambition is to establish New Zealand as a national chapter of ALSA International. That connection would open direct pathways for New Zealand's Asian law students: international competitions held across Asia, exposure to how law is practised in different Asian jurisdictions, direct engagement with Asian law firms operating internationally, and the kind of cross-border relationships that are increasingly relevant in a legal market becoming more globally connected every year.
New Zealand's legal profession has an opportunity to be genuinely fluent in the legal and commercial cultures of its largest trading partners and fastest-growing communities. ALSA is building the students who will make that possible for the next generation.
ALSA runs five structured programmes covering academic skills, professional development, mentoring, student engagement, and marketing.
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