A Reflection on the 2026 Diversity in Law Evening

By Macey Wong

Nobody tells you, when you sign up for a law degree, that some of the most insightful evenings of your legal education will happen after hours. Last Monday, the Banco Court found itself filled with students, legal professionals, and advocates who knew that the University of Queensland Law Society's Diversity in Law Evening was one worth showing up for.

This year's panel brought together six accomplished legal professionals — Luke Furness of Clayton Utz, who served as Master of Ceremonies, barrister Reimen Hii, Professor Tamara Walsh of the University of Queensland, barrister Kerala Drew, Franka Cheung of Corrs Chambers Westgarth, and The Honourable Justice Soraya Ryan, each speaking to their experience of diversity and inclusion in the legal profession with the particular honesty of those who have navigated it firsthand.

Making Your Differences Irrelevant: Navigating Bias with Excellence and Determination

(Justice Soraya Ryan)

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from having to make your difference irrelevant. The Honourable Justice Soraya Ryan put it with characteristic directness. She had to perform well enough that her gender simply stopped being a conversation.

Her Honour’s career is extraordinary. A UQ graduate, prize-winner, Queen’s Counsel, and now President of the Mental Health Court of Queensland. But during her time at the criminal Bar, Justice Ryan had to demonstrate her competence not merely to satisfy her own standards, but to give clients the confidence that her abilities transcended whatever assumptions and prejudices they may have arrived with. Excellence, in that context, was not optional. It was the price of being taken seriously at all.

It is worth noting just how literal that exclusion once was. During her Honour’s time at the UQ Law School, the building had only male bathrooms. Women made do with one that had 'fe' handwritten before the 'male' on the door. The message, however unintentional, was this: the space had been built without them in mind!

Much has changed since then. Women now make up 60% of the legal profession, and the makeshift bathroom sign is long gone. But Justice Ryan was careful not to let that progress flatten a more complicated reality. The legal profession is not a monolith, and its progress has not been uniform. Criminal law, in her experience, has moved more slowly than other areas such as commercial law. Not every courtroom has kept pace, and not every corner of the profession has extended the same welcome. Better? Yes. There yet? No.

Among her most resonant observations was this: that the substance of an argument should never be judged by the form in which it arrives. For anyone who has ever second-guessed how they come across in a room—too quiet, too different, not what’s expected—it is a principle worth holding onto.

And for those not yet anywhere near the top of the profession, Her Honour offered something quietly reassuring. You don't have to be the best. But you should always aim to be your best. It is a small distinction and an enormous amount of room to grow into.

Visibility and the Importance of Leading by Example

(Franka Cheung)

Franka Cheung is a partner at Corrs Chambers Westgarth who has spent her career at the intersection of some of the most complex corporate and commercial transactions in Australia's energy and resources sector, advising governments, institutional investors, and private enterprises on deals that shape the country's economic landscape. She occupies a space that has historically been, and in parts remains, dominated by men. Her reflections on that reality were measured, precise, and powerful.

Gender, she said, was not always an overt obstacle. But assumptions were a different matter. When others made assumptions about her, it taught her to check her own. It is a deceptively simple observation, and one that cuts in both directions: a reminder that the experience of being on the receiving end of bias carries with it a responsibility to do better. Background, she argued, matters far less than the skills you bring to the client in front of you. Even if you're not the most extroverted person in the room, the advice was straightforward. Speak up about what you want. The people worth working with will listen.

She spoke about the value of mentorship not as a formal program, but as a space to find yourself and become comfortable with the knowledge that you don't need to be the loudest voice in the room to be heard within it.

Visibility matters. When leaders are open about the time and space they create for wellbeing and inclusion, they make it easier for those further down the hierarchy to ask for what they need. Small gestures, compounded over time, have a tendency to become culture.

Adversity, Determination, and Breaking into the Profession

(Kerala Drew)

Kerala Drew moved to Australia in 2017 with a First-Class Honours Degree from Queen Mary University of London and the University of Hong Kong. She had qualifications, experience, and ambition. What she didn’t have, it turned out, was the familiarity Australian firms wanted as firms did not always know what to do with qualifications earned elsewhere.

Of the 64 applications she sent out, seven firms replied with a rejection. The rest didn't respond at all. When she did eventually secure a foothold, it was unpaid. She had to work through a trial period before anyone would commit to paying her for what she already knew how to do. It is a remarkable detail and the kind that could break a person. For Kerala, it didn't! What kept her going, she said plainly, was stubbornness. For those navigating their own walls of silence and unanswered emails, her experience offers something more useful than reassurance—it offers proof. You don't have to believe every door will open. You simply have to keep knocking and stay long enough for the one that does. 

Today she is a barrister at Holmes Chambers practising predominantly in criminal law, and Vice President of the Women Lawyers Association of Queensland. The distance between those titles and the 64 unanswered applications is not lost on her. If anything, it shapes the advice she gives. Knowing how hard it can be to get even one foot in the door, her advice to students was not to wait for the perfect opportunity, but to pursue every available one, because you cannot know in advance what will spark something in you and be the one that changes things. Kerala’s own turning point was not a grand opening; it was a single decision to leave a secure position and pursue the work she was most passionate about. The decision was not easy, but she knew it was right.

Creating Space and Starting the Conversation

(Reimen Hii)

Reimen Hii is a barrister of Malaysian Chinese heritage whose career has taken him from a United Nations-backed war crimes tribunal in Cambodia to the Supreme Court of Tonga, from domestic private practice to academia, and to the presidency of the Queensland branch of the Asian Australian Lawyers Association (‘AALA’). That he ended up at the Bar at all is, by his own account, something of a surprise. More introverted by nature, he had not imagined that advocacy would become his home. But it did—and that, for those who have ever felt that the profession was looking for someone slightly different from them, is perhaps the most useful thing to take from his story. There is no one type. The Bar is broader than its reputation suggests. Of course, it is easier in retrospect, and Reimen was quite candid about parts of his journey where this was not always the case.

As a junior lawyer, he described the particular bind of cultural and professional deference, and the unspoken understanding that those from backgrounds that prize respect for authority are rarely in a position to challenge the rooms they find themselves in. Much of the problematic behaviour he encountered came not from malice, but from a failure to reflect—from well-meaning people who had never examined their own assumptions, nor considered how their conduct affected those around them. Rather than endure it, he chose to act, establishing AALA as a vehicle for representation, education, and genuine professional engagement. The conversation was not happening on its own, so he started it. His advice to students was to do the same. Introversion, as his own career demonstrates, is not a disqualification. If something is not right, find your way to say so and act on it.

Ask First, Act Second: On Meaningful Advocacy and Carving Your Own Path in Law

(Prof Tamara Walsh)

A Professor of Law and Director of the UQ Pro Bono Centre, Professor Tamara Walsh’s research examines the impact of the law on some of society's most vulnerable people. She has spent her career establishing projects that ask the law to look at itself clearly and brought that same quality to the panel.

Her central argument was this: do not make assumptions. Not about the people you serve, not about the colleagues beside you, and not, perhaps most importantly, about yourself. For Professor Walsh, this is not an abstract principle. It sits at the heart of her own work.

Much of her career has been spent advocating for people who occupy a very different position in society than her own. That gap is something she thinks about carefully. It is easy, when standing in a position of relative privilege, to presume that you know what the person in front of you needs. But meaningful change cannot be imposed from the outside. It has to be built in conversation with the people it is meant to serve. Genuinely asking and then listening to the answer is not just good practice, it is a form of respect.

She spoke about the students she encounters who arrive in law school with their careers already decided, their futures mapped onto someone else's path. The task of legal education, in her view, is not to provide a better map. It is to help students learn enough about themselves to draw their own. That path does not have to stay within the boundaries of the profession itself. Some of the most fulfilled people she has taught went on to pursue careers that looked nothing like the ones they had initially planned.

Her own turning point was instructive. The demands of parenthood changed not just her circumstances, but her. What she had once wanted from her career was not the same as what she wanted after. And that, she suggested, is not a failure of direction. Paths are not meant to be fixed and followed without deviation. They shift as the person walking them shifts. It is simply what growth looks like.

"Every path is what you make it." — Professor Tamara Walsh

Until Next Year

As the evening drew to a close, the panel made clear that belonging in the legal profession has rarely been given freely—it has been built, negotiated, and in some cases constructed from scratch by people who were told, implicitly or otherwise, that the room was not designed for them. Each panellist, in their own way, had encountered that message. None of them had accepted it.

Progress has been made, and it is worth acknowledging. But progress is not the same as arrival, and the legal profession, for all its evolution, remains a work in progress. The gaps are real, the pace has been uneven, and the work of closing them has fallen, too often, on those who could least afford to carry it.

For students leaving the evening, the collective message was perhaps this: the profession will not always meet you where you are. But that is not the same as saying there is no place in it for you. Find your corner of it. Question its assumptions, including your own. And if the conversation you need is not happening consider being the one to start it.

Thanks:

The UQLS extends its heartfelt thanks to Corrs Chambers Westgarth for their continued support in making the Diversity in Law Evening possible. It is a partnership that reflects a shared understanding: that a more diverse profession is not simply a fairer one, but a better one. The conversations that began this Monday evening do not end when the room empties. They continue in the choices that students make, the cultures that future lawyers help to shape, and the doors that each generation works to open a little wider than they found them. The UQLS looks forward to continuing that conversation at next year's Diversity in Law Evening and to the stories that are still waiting to be told.