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"Being the solicitor general is a great privilege and a great burden,” summed up Una Rustom Jagose, the first woman in New Zealand to be appointed to this imposing office. Due to start her second year as the second law officer of state in New Zealand (the first is the attorney general) on February 15, 2017, in her email responses to Parsiana Jagose mentioned, "I have a significant role in ensuring the government governs according to law.”
The solicitor general is also the chief executive of the Crown Law Office (CLO) that comprises lawyers employed to represent the attorney general in court proceedings in New Zealand. "Luckily that means I get a team of about 170 people who are very smart, very dedicated to the rule of law and to high quality, customer-focused lawyering to help me carry out my role,” Jagose stated, adding, "I want to be a strong and effective leader of the Office and my cooperative, constructive approach to people and problems is a real benefit in achieving that ambition.”
Jagose explains, "I cannot talk about the interesting legal work I am doing as it is privileged… I do not think being the first woman to hold this role has any particular challenges…I have always worked for the government as a lawyer…” During the 14 years she worked with Crown Law, she undertook many roles including chief legal advisor at the Ministry of Fisheries, deputy solicitor, Crown Legal Risk for two years, and acting director, Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB).
Concurrently, appointed Her Majesty’s Queen’s Counsel (QC) in 2016, she is one of the 282 Counsels in New Zealand since the inception of the office 110 years ago. Having graduated in law from Otago University in Dunedin and earned her LLM (first class honors) from the Victoria University of Wellington, in an interview with Jagose featured on ilanz.org, the website of the In-house Lawyers Association of New Zealand, she referred to her journey in the legal domain. The write-up was shared with Parsiana by Dr Venkat Iyer, a subscriber and senior lecturer at the Ulster University, School of Law, Ireland. When aspiring to work as a solicitor general, Jagose "didn’t really have a very good idea about how I was going to get there.” She undertook some leadership development through the State Services Commission (SSC) and received "confronting feedback…I was strongly encouraged to be deliberate about broadening my experience.” Although not very receptive to the suggestion initially, she started widening her ambit which proved rewarding.
When the SSC carried out a recruitment process on behalf of the attorney general, they recommended Jagose for the solicitor general’s post. "I have worked with Ms Jagose over a number of years in her roles at Crown Law and GCSB. She has very sound legal judgment and has proven herself a capable and effective leader,” attorney general Christopher Finlayson QC was quoted by beehive.govt.nz, the official website of the NZ government.
As amplified on the CLO (Maori: Te Tari Ture o te Karauna) website: "Subject only to the attorney general, the solicitor general is the government’s chief legal adviser and advocate in the courts. In practice, the solicitor general provides advice directly to ministers, departments and agencies of government and will appear as senior counsel for government interests in litigation and in particular appellate court matters. A key responsibility is to advise the government on constitutional questions…(and undertake) responsibility for the prosecution of criminal jury trials and Crown representation in appeals against conviction and sentences… As the non-political law officer… (it is) the solicitor general’s duty to give independent advice and, in relation to certain functions, to act independently… The CLO…does not provide legal services to members of the public.”
The sensitive yet principled jurist believes, "You can be brilliant and smart, and not be a very good lawyer because lawyering is not only about what the law is or the most beautiful analysis of the law. If you don’t get your client’s context and their consequences right, if you deliver your beautifully rendered advice too late or communicate it in a way that does not fit into that client’s frame, if you do not give them options to achieve their outcomes, you might as well not bother…
"What I have learned about myself is that I am a very good leader of people, and that has been really energizing and exciting,” Jagose assessed her strengths for ilanz. To promote diversity of thinking among her staff she has been keen that every chief legal adviser assume the role of another chief legal adviser for a year so that "we can benefit from those shared skills and wisdom.” As she further declared, "When you push yourself out of that comfort zone…great things can happen.”

"We were lucky”
The fourth of five children born to Rustom, a doctor from Bombay, and his wife Anne, an Irish nurse, Una (a traditional Gaelic name from Ireland) followed brother Pheroze and two elder sisters Maki and Annamarie. The youngest among the siblings is sister Fiona.
Rustom and Anne had met in London where they were working at Battersea General Hospital.  "My parents required papal dispensation to marry as Anne is a Catholic,” states Una, adding, "After they married in the 1950s they lived in Bombay with Rustom’s father Jamshed for a short period before emigrating to New Zealand” where Rustom was appointed a superintendent at a hospital in Dunedin, a far south city in the South Island originally settled by Scottish immigrants to NZ. Whilst Una was born in Ashburton in the South Island, when she was two years old the family moved to the North Island town of Cambridge where Rustom held the position of general surgeon and superintendent at Waikato Hospital. In the 1970s her parents established their own general practice in Cambridge, in a surgery specially built and attached to their house. "That meant that as young children we were lucky to always return home from school to two parents. If they were busy working in the surgery we would enter the home through the surgery and say hello to any patients we knew in the waiting room.
"My father naturalized as a New Zealand citizen and never returned to India. Both his parents died before I was born. He had one sister, Rupina, who visited New Zealand once but I was very young. I do not remember her. He had only one cousin, Tehmu Jagose, who died a long time ago, whose family still lives in Bombay and with whom we stay in communication. My mother and… (two) sisters have been to visit Bombay but I have not, yet,” related Una. Anne who continues to live in Cambridge is a regular visitor to Wellington where Una resides with Jenny, her partner for 26 years.
"All of us children were raised in the Catholic faith although I no longer practice any religion,” revealed Una. One connection that the children have retained with their "father’s heritage is that we all have Rustom for our second name.” When Rustom died in 1991 after a long period of illness, Una was 23 years old and recalls how "he was always very proud of me and of all his family. I only wish he could see me now.”