Waimea Weekly
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Wednesday 11 January 2023
TV show helps Gillian fight law and win Heading to court is challenging enough without taking it on alone. The cost of a lawyer was out of reach for one 40-year-old mother-of-five. So, inspired by what she’d seen on the TV series Suits, she headed into the courtroom on her own. Today she tells reporter Tracy Neal what it takes to not only defend yourself, but come away with the law on your side. Gillian Bearman knows how to win an argument. Firstly, she’s a mother of five – the eldest approaching teenagehood, the youngest aged just three. Secondly, the 40-year-old Richmond woman read a bit of law during her business studies – but admits to having learned how to cross-examine witnesses from watching television. “I don’t really watch TV that much. However, I did get hooked on the Netflix series Suits,” she laughs.
She’s applied some of what she learned off the TV to her four years fighting claims against her, for work on a trampoline park venture that went belly-up in 2019. Bearman’s story started in 2018 when her firm Urban Wolfire bought into Australian indoor trampoline arena franchise Flip Out to set up an arena in Wellington. The idea was driven by a wish to blend her interest in business with things her children enjoyed.
Bearman was living in Westport at the time with her partner Blair Colligan, an entrepreneur in bottled water and minerals. The pair share the raising of Bearman’s three children from a previous relationship and the two younger children they have together. However, the trampoline park venture didn’t turn out as planned. “I was pretty much fighting the whole year I was open.” Bearman said there was friction with franchise owner Steven
Stone; he said she was difficult to deal with. Then came budget over-runs and the last straw when a problem arose over the steel used in the construction of the trampolines - Bearman said it wasn’t up to scratch and Worksafe said it didn’t meet Health and Safety regulations. In August 2019 Bearman’s company went into voluntary liquidation and the legal wrangles gathered steam, which in the end boiled down to a single unpaid bill from the electrician for just
under $14,000. As a result, the sparkie, Lower Hutt-based Mike’s Electrical Services Limited (MEL), took her to court – twice. In between, she batted off bankruptcy. At the heart of the dispute was the billing arrangement the builder and electrician had with Bearman’s company. The electrician was sending his invoices to the builder, who then included the amount in the invoice sent to
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