Good employment advocates have a legitimate role. Unregulated operators who increase cost, delay, and conflict do not have a legitimate claim to remain beyond accountability.

New Zealand’s employment disputes system is meant to resolve problems. It is not meant to reward people for making them worse. This may sound blunt, but it is also true.

Anyone who has spent time around employment disputes knows the type. The representative who turns every disagreement into a crusade. The one who treats aggression as skill. The one who promises outcomes the evidence cannot carry. The one who drives up cost, delay, and conflict while carrying little meaningful accountability.

That is not access to justice. It is a threat to it.

This is not an attack on employment advocates as a profession. Good advocates do legitimate and valuable work. They make specialist help more accessible. They help people understand an unfamiliar process. They test weak reasoning. They can bring balance to a relationship where power is not always evenly shared.

The issue is not whether a representative holds a lawyer’s practising certificate.

The issue is simpler.

If someone charges money to represent people (or companies) in employment disputes, should that person be allowed to do so without minimum standards of competence, conduct, and accountability?

The answer should be no.

Good faith is not decorative language

Good faith sits at the centre of New Zealand employment law.

Section 4 of the Employment Relations Act 2000 requires parties to an employment relationship to deal with each other in good faith. It prohibits conduct that misleads or deceives, or is likely to mislead or deceive. It says good faith is wider than the implied duties of mutual trust and confidence. It requires parties to be active and constructive, responsive and communicative.

Those are not ornamental words. They describe the kind of employment-relations system Parliament intended to create. The statutory duty applies to the parties identified in s 4. It does not automatically make every independent representative personally subject to the employer–employee duty in exactly the same way. But that legal distinction does not end the matter.

It exposes a policy problem.

The duty of good faith cannot stop at the representative’s door.

A system that requires employers and employees to be active, constructive, responsive, and communicative should not look away when a person paid to act for one of them obstructs those same objectives. The representative may stand just outside the statutory wording. But the representative can still shape the dispute. And escalate the dispute. And prolong the dispute. And make resolution harder for everyone standing inside it.

That gap matters.

The system already knows representatives carry responsibilities

The Employment Relations Authority’s Practice Note 3 recognises that representatives carry responsibilities. They have twin duties. They must assist their client. They must also assist the Authority in meeting its statutory obligation to resolve employment relationship problems.

Representatives are expected to be polite and constructive. They are expected to comply with timetables and orders. They are expected to provide required information. And they are expected to fairly and fully disclose the Authority’s directions to their clients.

So the system already knows something important.

Representation is not theatre. It is not a licence to obstruct. It is not a licence to mislead. And it is not a licence to turn every procedural step into a battlefield. Practice Note 3 also records possible responses to misconduct. The Authority may engage directly with the parties. It may complain to a representative’s professional body, if any. It may impose a penalty on the advocate personally under s 134A where it is satisfied the representative has obstructed or delayed its investigation.

The words “if any” do a great deal of work.

A voluntary professional body can set meaningful standards for its members. It can promote discipline, competence, and trust. But it cannot protect the whole system when the people most in need of supervision can simply remain outside it.

That is the problem. Not an absence of expectations. An absence of consistent regulation. A system can have standards written down and still lack the machinery to make them real.

An institutional hall in slate and burnt orange: a raised bench flanked by tall columns, a wall of brass filing cabinets to one side, and a burnt-orange line crossing the polished floor toward a window and distant hills.

The courts have begun drawing lines

The Employment Court has not been silent about representative conduct.

In Joyce v Ultimate Siteworks Ltd [2024] NZEmpC 204, the Court addressed concerns about an advocate’s conduct. The judgment confirmed that a representative does not have an unqualified right of appearance. The Court may prevent a representative from continuing where the circumstances require it:

While s 236 and sch 3 cl 2 of the Employment Relations Act 2000 permit a party to be represented by another person, a representative does not have an unfettered right to appear before the Court. The Court is not obliged to sit still and see its own processes abused. When that happens, the Court has the inherent power to control the representatives in relation to matters before it.

It recognises a basic institutional truth: a court is not required to sit quietly while its processes are abused.

In Menzies v Corrigan [2025] NZEmpC 107, the Court awarded increased costs after a discontinuance and recorded that the plaintiff’s representative’s behaviour had increased costs. In the later costs judgment, Menzies v Corrigan [2025] NZEmpC 186, the Court confirmed that a representative is not beyond scrutiny and can be ordered to pay costs personally where their own conduct warrants it.

These concerns are not unique to advocates. Lawyer representatives can drive cost and delay too, and the case law on representative conduct is not confined to those without a practising certificate. The argument here is not about a title. It is about a standard that should apply to anyone who is paid to represent a party.

These decisions are important. But they are not enough.

Litigation-stage control is not the same as a regulatory system. Judicial intervention is case-specific. It usually comes after the damage has already been done. Time has been spent. Money has been spent. Positions have hardened. Trust has thinned.

A court can draw a line in a particular case. It cannot, by itself, give every client a clear entry standard, a public register, a universal code, an ordinary complaints route, and a disciplinary body able to act before the next dispute is damaged. That work belongs to regulation.

Cost and delay are not abstract

The Government’s 2026 consultation on the employment dispute system did not appear from nowhere.

The Cabinet paper supporting consultation recorded that settlement rates had fallen from up to 80 per cent of cases in 2017 to 67.2 per cent in 2024/25. It also recorded that average financial remedies awarded by the Authority had increased from $12,800 in 2015/16 to $31,800 in 2024/25.

Those figures do not prove that employment advocates caused either trend. It would be careless to say they do. But the same official material recorded concerns that the behaviour and quality of some representatives, including advocates, may affect settlement incentives and expectations about proportionate settlements. That is the point.

Poor representation does not only affect the person who hired the representative. It burdens the opposing party. It consumes mediation resources. It consumes Authority resources. It delays other disputes. It hardens positions that careful advice might have softened. It turns solvable problems into expensive rituals of mutual exhaustion.

An employee with a genuine grievance can be harmed by inflated promises and tactical theatre. An employer can be forced to spend disproportionate amounts responding to claims that do not sit securely on the evidence. Both sides can lose months. And the public system carries the drag while the dispute keeps walking.

Regulation is not the same as closing the profession

The answer does not need to be a lawyers-only monopoly. That would confuse title with quality.

A credible framework could preserve a distinct employment-advocacy profession while requiring, at minimum:

The detail matters. Regulation can become expensive. It can become bureaucratic. It can be captured by incumbents. It can protect the already-established and make entry harder for capable new practitioners. Those risks are real.

They are reasons to design the framework carefully. They are not reasons to accept an accountability vacuum.

Access to AI makes accountability more urgent, not less

Today, almost anyone can produce a letter that looks authoritative. AI can generate submissions, allegations, settlement proposals, and legal-sounding analysis in minutes. But a tool does not create judgment. It does not verify the facts. It does not understand the evidentiary record. It does not calibrate a remedy. It does not identify a weak instruction. It does not accept responsibility when an assertion is wrong.

This is where Lex Praxis takes a firm position.

Professional knowledge and lived experience may be strengthened by AI, but they cannot be replaced by it.

Employment disputes require verification. They require disciplined process. They require robust evidentiary chains. They require someone to know not only what can be said, but what should be said, and what should not be advanced at all.

The human representative remains responsible. Responsible for the advice given, for the allegations made, for the settlement position taken, and for whether the conduct of the matter assists resolution or manufactures conflict.

AI will make competent practitioners more capable. It may also make incompetent or reckless operators faster, louder, and more convincing. That makes minimum standards more important, not less.

A close view of a slate desk in warm light: a closed cream ledger and a brass pen beside a burnt-orange inlaid line, with loose papers and open files scattered on the surface behind.

Accountability protects good advocates

Competent advocates should not fear a credible regulatory framework. They should help shape it. Regulation would distinguish practitioners who invest in knowledge, ethics, and careful representation from operators who depend on clients being unable to tell the difference.

It would give the public a way to verify who they are dealing with. It would give good advocates a professional structure worthy of the work they perform. Most importantly, it would bring the conduct of paid representatives into closer alignment with the good-faith system in which they operate.

Bluntly:

If your business model depends on there being no minimum standard of competence, conduct, or accountability, the problem is not regulation. The problem is your business model.

New Zealand’s employment disputes system cannot afford cowboys. Neither can the employees and employers who must live with the consequences.

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Sources

This article provides general information and commentary. It is not legal advice.