After 17 years as a legal executive at Le Pine & Co based mainly in Tūrangi, Kathy Doyle is retiring. Photo / Laurilee McMichael
Kathy Doyle says she's always had a passion for law.
And one of the best parts of her job as a legal executive at Le Pine & Co has been working through the various challenges that people have brought to her office.
It's in Tūrangi where Kathy has spent the majority of her time with Le Pine and has got to know many of the local community.
She describes the role of legal executive as "understudies for a solicitor". A legal executive does similar work but is qualified through a different course.
Kathy grew up in Lower Hutt, one in a family of 10 siblings, which she jokes made her good at negotiation and managing conflict.
I've been in law since I was 16, in 1965. I started down in Wellington as an office junior in a law firm and was there for 39 years."
She began her career with the firm Martin, Evans-Scott & Hurley, which went on to become Brandon's, where she gained her legal executive certificate and studied law for two years at Victoria University.
The move to Le Pine came after she was offered a job in the Tūrangi office by Peter Fanning, then a partner at Le Pine, but who had actually been trained in Wellington by Kathy when he was a junior solicitor.
Le Pine had a couple of lawyers who would spend a few hours in Tūrangi every week to see clients and get documents signed but needed somebody there on a more regular basis.
Kathy and husband Paddy had a holiday home at Omori and their children had grown up so the timing was right. The Doyles moved up in February 2004. She says it wasn't hard to convince Paddy to make the move.
"He's a great fisherman and golfer and he thought he was coming up here to retire and fish and golf but that only lasted a few months and he got a bit bored so he did a window-cleaning business within the bays and just general handyman work."
With Kathy in the Tūrangi office regularly, an increase in business followed.
"The plan was that I was coming up to wind down but I wound up instead. It started off that I was given work from this office and the Tūrangi office really took off with conveyancing and wills and estates and things like that and it just grew over the years to a full-time office.
"People come with problems with estate work that their mum or their dad haven't got a will and I've been doing estate work forever."
Kathy says through her work she has met many of the people in Tūrangi, from older families with a long history and extensive links to each other and the area, to more recent arrivals from overseas or out of town who come for the fishing and the lifestyle. That diversity is part of what she enjoys about her role.
The biggest challenge over her career in Tūrangi was that many people did not have wills. After they died, Kathy would have to sort out their estates.
"With the big families, not having a will means it's a really big job and I always feel once I get to the end of a particular job that it's a big satisfaction to be able to get letters of administration through the court.
"I think the biggest one was an only child ... he died without a will and no children in New Zealand and I had to track down his relations in the United Kingdom and it was only through one of the second cousins who had sent letters to him during his lifetime that I managed to track down his family. They didn't even know him and they got a big estate. I've had a lot of those.
"That's been the most satisfying part of my work, working through those issues.
"I always like to think I can work through an issue. It may take me a while to think through the logistics of it but there's always an outcome."
Kathy had to deal with several estates of male bachelors who had come to Tūrangi to work on the tunnels, had no immediate family in town and had died with money squirrelled away.
But there was one she remembers who had the foresight to come to her beforehand.
"[He] said 'you tell me what charities to put in my will' and I said 'no, you choose them', and I gave him a list ... he ended up giving it to Tūrangi Library, Tūrangi Ambulance, Tūrangi Fire Station, they all received an inheritance from him because he didn't have any family."
Aside from the law, Kathy had a deep involvement with netball when she was in Wellington, first as a player and later as a New Zealand umpire. She later moved into netball administration and was on the New Zealand Netball Board and Wellington Netball. She was instrumental in starting the Capital Shakers netball team which went on to become the Central Pulse and also in luring goal shoot Irene van Dyk from South Africa to New Zealand, a move that was controversial and enraged the South African netball establishment.
"She [Irene] was coming out for 12 weeks to play for the franchise and then at the end of the franchise she said - she always calls me Mama Kathy, both her and her husband - and she said 'Mama Kathy, I can't go back to South Africa, we need to bring [husband] Christie over' ... and that was the start of that era.
"She lives in Hawke's Bay now, and I see her whenever I'm over."
Kathy's last day with Le Pine & Co is December 23 and she says she plans to spend more time with her six grandchildren and play more golf.
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