The 2024 Elite Woman shares what keeps her going in an emotionally heavy field of law
Cooper Legal’s Sonja Cooper has loved the law since she was 12 – and shows no sign of losing interest after 50 years.
At 62, the 2024 Elite Woman continues to be a staunch advocate for young offenders and a regular presence at Youth Court. In the first part of this interview, Cooper shares how the firm handles taking on emotionally heavy cases, and the reason why she stays on.
I had a couple of uncles who were in law – one was a commercial lawyer, and the other one was a lecturer at Victoria University. When I was about 12, I had to do a project, and I decided to do it on a criminal trial. Through the uncle who was working at a law firm, I met with a lawyer who did criminal work, and he took me through a criminal trial and what it would involve. And I became really interested at that stage and decided at age 12 that I would become a lawyer and stuck to that. Now I'm 62, so I’ve been interested in the law for 50 years – and I still love it.
We lived as a poor family in a rich area when I was growing up, and that got me interested in family law, which I focused on for about 15 years. Once I was admitted to the bar, I started my career working as a criminal lawyer for young offenders from 1987. We were still under the Children and Young Persons Act 1974, and the Oranga Tamariki Act came into effect in 1991. From then on, I worked with and have continued to work with young offenders. Recently, I was in Youth Court, and at the age of 62 I say to myself, “Am I too old? Am I too disconnected from teenagers?” But the professionals I work with all reassure me that I'm doing a good job, and I still feel really committed to it.
One of the reasons for that is because the vast majority of the work that we do is with survivors of abuse and care. Since 1995, we would have acted for thousands of survivors. Most of them are going through care as children, through social welfare, and, more recently, Oranga Tamariki. I know what happens at the other end if you don't do a good job at the early stage and you don't get the supports in place, and you don't work to try and put in place the structures and the supports that are necessary so that they don't become another statistic and go into the adult criminal justice system.
The more we know about the way the brain develops and the more that we understand about the impact of trauma and harm on a teenage brain, the more I feel frustrated about our lack of resources and how many young people go through the court never having had a neuro, psych assessment. I think the stats would say around 80% to 90% will have a neuro disability, and yet most of them will never be diagnosed, and then they'll end up in the adult criminal justice system, and they still won't be diagnosed. And they'll be treated as if they've got all the ability to make good decisions when, due to a neuro disability, they're never going to be able to make those good, thought-out decisions.
So that's one of my frustrations with the system, but it's something that drives me to keep doing a good job. The abuse work is where the vast majority of our work comes from, and that's a journey I started when I went out on my own in 1995. At that stage, there was actually little understood about the link between abuse and the impact on brain injury and its link with post-traumatic stress disorder, alcohol and drug abuse, and lots of syndromes, so we were struggling to get around the Limitation Act. We had to push the boundaries of the law at that stage and create a pathway for survivors through the Limitation Act and then through liability of the state.
More recently, we've got the Bill of Rights Act, which we've actually never been able to test in court yet because they've always settled. But I still have a real goal of actually getting some judicial decisions on what the Bill of Rights Act means for victims, particularly children who are abused victims.
I grew up in a single parent household, and life was a bit of a struggle but I think that also gave me a lot of resilience. I think I have always been a bit “bloody minded”, and I understood that one of our primary tasks in this work was to give these people a voice when they had never had a voice, and to believe them when no one else had believed them. That became the marker for me about not wanting to be someone else that let them down, that walked away.
So we all have to be resilient – like, you can't become resilient doing this work, you have to be resilient because secondary traumatisation is a real issue in our work and some of the cases that I've done have really deeply impacted me. So we have to have techniques for dealing with that. I do exercise, which is really important. I read.
We have a lot of humour in the office, we have dogs in the office, and we've had times when we've told silly limericks or celebrated with a glass of bubbles. We'll look after one another; if we're having a hard time, we debrief. The lawyers who've been interviewing clients will do a debrief with me after every interview. If I'm interviewing, I will do a debrief with a senior colleague as well. And we have EAP, so we've got lots of processes in place.
