About Deborah Manning

Deborah Manning (BA/LLB, Hons, PGCertProf) is the founder of The Good Practice Company in her role as a trained professional supervisor from the University of Auckland (2017). Her experience includes being a barrister and Senior Lecturer at AUT Law School. She has practised in public law and human rights law for over 25 years, appearing at every level of the New Zealand court system – from the Refugee Status Unit and Immigration and Protection Tribunal to the High Court, Court of Appeal, and Supreme Court.

Deborah is what she calls a pracademic – someone who moves between professional practice and academic scholarship without treating them as separate activities. Her legal work informs her teaching, her teaching sharpens her practice, and both ground her research. That integration is at the heart of everything The Good Practice Company does.

Her work sits at the intersection of professional obligation and human reality. Over decades of practice – representing some of the most vulnerable people in the legal system, teaching clinical legal studies, and supervising practitioners across multiple disciplines – she has become increasingly interested in a question the legal profession has not yet clearly answered: what does effective legal practice actually require of its practitioners, beyond doctrinal knowledge and analytical skill?

That question drives her current research and the work of The Good Practice Company. Lawyers are trained to analyse, argue, and advise. They are rarely trained to be present to the human reality they encounter before, during, and after they do any of those things. Professional supervision, transdisciplinary knowledge, and ethical AI governance are three ways of closing that gap — and they are the three things GPC exists to provide.

Deborah holds a postgraduate qualification in professional supervision from the University of Auckland and has recently completed the AI Ethics, Regulation and Compliance Programme at the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School (2026). She is a Senior Lecturer at AUT's Faculty of Business, Economics and Law. She is also an Associate Member of the Arbitrators and Mediators Institute of New Zealand (AMINZ) since 2020.