The New Zealand Law Society's Southland Otago Conference 2026 runs on Friday 18 and Saturday 19 September at the Ascot Park Hotel in Invercargill, with the organiser expecting more than 100 delegates and offering up to 10 CPD hours. The listing carries only the 18 September date; the official programme confirms a two-day event with the main conference day on Saturday 19 September.
The New Zealand Law Society's Southland Otago Conference 2026 will be held at the Ascot Park Hotel in Invercargill on Friday 18 and Saturday 19 September, according to the Law Society's official event page, which says more than 100 delegates are expected and that the programme carries up to 10 continuing professional development hours.
The published programme opens on the Friday with two pre-conference workshops: a New Practitioners Workshop from 11.30am to 3pm led by Judge Doyle, Richard Smith, Savanna Gaskill and Dr Sarah Anticich, followed by a two-hour cyber security session from 3pm to 5pm presented by Steven Bradley of Texas. Welcome drinks and canapes follow at 5pm at the Ascot Park Hotel.
Saturday is the main conference day. Registration opens at 8am, with the conference opened at 9.15am by Southland Branch President Chris Peddie and a Law Society update from President David Campbell at 9.20am. Bradley delivers the opening keynote on the ethics of artificial intelligence at 9.30am, and Dr Nicki Macklin closes the day with a keynote at 3.15pm before the conference finishes at 4.15pm.
Between the keynotes the programme runs three rounds of three concurrent breakout sessions, covering the Building Amendment Bill liability regime, psychology in legal practice, judicial best practice in the criminal jurisdiction, evidential reliability and memory, the initiation of arbitration, employment law in business transactions, the Trusts Act 2019 five years on, accounting fundamentals for lawyers, and a judicial panel on the Evidence Act 2006. A conference dinner is held off site at Hideaway 201, with coach transfers leaving the Ascot Park Hotel at 6pm and returning delegates about 11pm.
The conference is a joint event of the New Zealand Law Society Te Kāhui Ture o Aotearoa's Southland and Otago branches. The Law Society's own branch page describes it as the only event of its kind within the organisation, rotating each year between Queenstown, Dunedin and Invercargill.
Both branches are long-established. The Law Society's Southland branch page records its founding in 1878 as the Southland District Law Society, operating from Invercargill, while the Otago branch was established in 1879 as the District Law Society of Otago and is based in Dunedin. The 2022 edition, scheduled for Queenstown, was cancelled under COVID-19 traffic light settings, with the branches noting at the time that the conference would next be held in Invercargill in July 2023.
Sponsors listed on the official page include LexisNexis, Gallagher Insurance, Mee & Henry Law, Our Family Wizard, AWS Legal, OneLaw and LEAP. The event page also lists exhibition stands among its features.
The audience is practising lawyers across the Otago and Southland regions, with the CPD hours structured to help members meet annual professional development requirements. The Friday New Practitioners Workshop targets lawyers early in their careers, while the Saturday breakout streams span property and construction, employment, trusts, arbitration, criminal and family practice, and practice management. Members of the judiciary feature throughout, with Judges Doyle, Williams and Crosbie all presenting.
The Ascot Park Hotel sits on the corner of Tay Street and Racecourse Road, next to the Ascot Park Racecourse. The Law Society's venue page describes it as an eight-minute drive from central Invercargill and a ten-minute drive from Invercargill Airport, and says the hotel is holding a delegate rate for registered attendees booked directly.
The Business Events Industry Aotearoa supplier directory lists the property as a Qualmark four-star hotel with 116 ground-floor hotel, motel and apartment rooms, nine meeting rooms and 312 square metres of exhibition space. Listed capacities run to 650 theatre style, 650 cocktail, 450 banquet, 250 classroom, 240 cabaret and 32 boardroom, with function facilities scaling from five people to 700. Other facilities include the Emberz restaurant and bar, a separate sports bar, an indoor heated pool, spa and fitness area, and extensive on-site parking.
Air New Zealand operates scheduled services into Invercargill Airport from Christchurch and Auckland, per the airport's flight information page. There are no direct Invercargill-Wellington services, so North Island delegates outside Auckland connect through one of those two ports.
The conference is a working example of regional dispersal in the New Zealand business events market. It is a professional association event of over 100 delegates that deliberately rotates outside the main centres, and in 2026 it lands in Invercargill rather than Queenstown or Dunedin, putting two nights of accommodation demand, catering and an off-site dinner into Southland.
The format is also typical of the accredited CPD segment that underpins much of the country's mid-sized conference activity: a Friday-Saturday pattern built around workshops, a welcome function, multi-stream content and a social programme, hosted in a single property that combines meeting space, exhibition space and on-site rooms. For Southland, an event of this size is close to the practical ceiling of what the region's largest hotel conference venue is regularly asked to handle, and it keeps Invercargill in a national association's standing rotation.
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