Where there’s no will, there’s a way

• Author: Laurilee McMichael
• Published date: 07 January 2021
• Date: 07 January 2021
• Publication title: Taupo Weekender

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...