Barrister Warwick Alexander Smith has been appointed an Associate Judge of the High Court, Attorney-General Christopher Finlayson announced today.
Associate Judge Smith graduated with a LLB from the
University of Otago in 1974 and commenced work as a solicitor with John O’Neill & Devereux in Dunedin, where he had been employed as a law clerk for the previous two years.
The following year he relocated to Auckland and joined Earl Kent Massey Palmer & Hamer, where he remained until 1979 when he left to take up a position as an Associate with Alexander Bennett Warnock & Mellsop. He was admitted to the partnership of that firm in 1981, leaving in 1989 when he was invited to join the partnership of
Chapman Tripp Sheffield Young.
Since 2000 Associate Judge Smith has been practising as a barrister sole, specialising in intellectual property and general commercial litigation.
In 2008-2009 Associate Judge Smith spent a year in London completing a LLM course at the University College of London.
He is a Fellow and Arbitration Panel Member of the Arbitrators’ and Mediators’ Institute of New Zealand and a member of the World Intellectual Property Organisation’s world-wide panel deciding complaints under ICANN’s Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy.
The new Associate Judge will sit in Wellington.
