Brent & Partners is made up of Allan Brent and you, my partner
Navigating law with purpose, precision, and partnership.
Brent & Partners offers regulatory, environmental and public law services.
We are about taking opportunities to use the law as a tool for public good. Our goal is simple: to help our partners do that as effectively as possible.
We work with different partners in different ways. How can we work with you?
Many businesses, professional services people, public service entities or NGOs recognise that sustained success involves financial viability as well as taking a positive role in their communities and places.
We can sharpen the legal ideas that will get you traction towards these aims, move those ideas along, and connect you with the other professionals whose skill sets you will need.
Philanthropic givers or charitable trusts know that they will be regularly approached by “ideas people” looking for funding. People making bequests can face similar issues.
Ideas people approaching potential givers can make the mistake of moving faster than the speed of trust. We prefer to take whatever time we need to cultivate discreet, trusting and durable relationships. We can help you test the ideas people bring to you, discerning ideas with good potential from ideas that represent opportunity cost, lost potential, or wasted money. We can also help those ideas fulfill their potential.
For barristers, we can provide active, practical and reliable instructing solicitor and junioring services. We can help with discovery, briefing, research, submissions or any other aspect of a case. We can offer law firms a similar service. You will get high-quality leverage, but not high fixed employment costs.
In the community
We walk our talk, so we’re interested in taking a positive role in our communities and places as much as financial viability.
Are you based around Southern New Zealand? Are you sustained by a strong sense of place down here? Do you or your local organisation want our place to retain its character as somewhere for more than business or property market opportunism? To be a place where you have a real stake in shaping a common life that fits our place? If so, we would be delighted to talk and see how we can help you.
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For Upper Clutha people who cannot afford basic legal services like job or tenancy advice, we may be able to help, or help you find the people you need.
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For young lawyers who haven’t found a place to call home in the law, or a legal mentor, or just want to hear about what we do, we can offer you our time for a chat.
How we work
Our process is different for every partner and client. That’s because the heart of an enduring relationship is always understanding what makes you tick.
Getting a clear shared understanding of your drivers is crucial in setting objectives together. After that, it is often straightforward to figure out the possibilities to get you where you want to go.
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Any lawyer can research and execute legal work. Allan brings something more to the table: he is a legal strategist. He can discern when to take the law as it is and when to target law reform; when to address the details or the whole picture; when to push boundaries; and when to use tools other than the law.
Allan is different to many cause-focused lawyers in that he always pays attention to bringing the right mix of passion and dispassion to issues.
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Allan has the subject-matter expertise that his clients expect.
His value-add comes though his unique approach. He embraces the mindset of a student of his craft, and often asks “which path should we take, and why?”
This is an approach no large language model can take, no automation can buy, and no qualification can teach.
About Allan
Since 2020, Allan Brent has helped start-up Environmental Law Initiative, an NGO. This work spanned building ELI’s internal culture and external mana, as well as its research and legal programme. In this time the team developed eight public law cases against various government bodies, all starting in the High Court. ELI’s cases have extracted many practical concessions from government departments, and it remains undefeated to this day.
Before this work, Allan spent his early legal career at some of New Zealand’s large commercial law firms involved across local government, environment, property, fisheries, general litigation work and much more. He followed this with stints working in the bush for the Department of Conservation and in development work for a university.
Having operated for over a decade, often at the cutting-edge of law, Allan is now unphased by the novel challenges that will inevitably arise in using legal tools to pursue worthy goals; by working with clients to navigate new terrain; or by the tenacity and sticking power required on such journeys.
Allan Brent is a southern New Zealander, a husband, and one to whom a relationship with place is important. He is a fifth-generation lawyer, or so the legend goes. Through this comes his bone-deep commitment to the service and ethics of legal work: Allan will go to the well for you.
Outside his legal career and on top of family life, Allan is an alpine climber, tramper, paraglider, runner, and part-time biker and sailor. To give back to these areas, he has been involved in Federated Mountain Clubs of New Zealand, or FMC, for four years. He has served as Vice-President for three of these years. FMC is New Zealand’s peak outdoor recreation body, founded in 1931. It works on numerous advocacy projects for many outdoor disciplines, and anything touching recreation on public conservation land and its margins. Currently Allan’s biggest FMC involvement is in securing a sustainable future for New Zealand’s backcountry hut and track network.
Allan lives out a passion for cultivating a positive public conversation about a sense of belonging to New Zealand, often with a legal dimension. He writes about this on Substack at Brenty’s Two Cents.
Get in touch
Interested in working together?
Send us a message and we will be in touch shortly.