A Landmark Day For Karen Powell

Today is a very special day for our Head Receptionist Karen Powell, who is celebrating 45 years with Harding Evans. Karen is following in her mother, Yvonne’s, footsteps- Yvonne Powell also worked at Harding Evans for 45 years!

How it all started

29^th July 1979. The Boomtown Rats were at number 1 in the charts with ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’, Jimmy Carter was US President and here in the UK, Margaret Thatcher had not long taken over as Prime Minister. It was also the day that Karen joined the firm as an Office Junior.

In those days, the doors would open at 9:15 am and Karen would start her day by completing all the local deliveries, which involved multiple stops throughout Newport, which at this time was still classed as a town. Her stops would include police stations, government buildings like courts, estate agents and even other solicitors.

Once back at the office, Karen would collect the drinks orders for the staff, turn the kettle on and deliver them to each office. This would be followed by photocopying duties, a very different task to how it looks today, which Karen says, “involved much more manual work, the largest size we could copy was B4 and we often had to tape pages together”. This would bring Karen up to lunch hour where she would ask each secretary what they would like for their lunch, leave the office and order them from a local business within the town. Karen would then head on her lunch which would start at 1pm and finish at 2:15pm, she would then again collect all the drinks orders and make the second round of the day. More photocopying would need to be completed to finish the day off before she would collect all the post from the staff and head over to the post office before finishing at 5.15.

How has Harding Evans changed since Karen started?

When Karen started Harding Evans was called Harding Evans and Lewis, following the merger of local firms Herbert & Harding, Frank Lewis, and Gustard & Evans.

With no computers, all records were kept on paper and Karen used to operate a doll’s eye switchboard to route calls to different members of staff.

With the growth of Harding Evans and the modernisation of the firm, Karen has seen many changes over the years “It is a very different firm to when I started, but there is one thing that hasn’t changed which is my favourite part of working here; all the friendly faces of clients I see come through the door, some who I would see once every few years but I always remember them and catch up with them, that’s the social element I love about the job. Someone once asked why have you stayed so long in one job? My answer was, simply, if you enjoy what you do, why leave”.

Congratulations Karen

It is not very common these days, for somewhere that has been operating for as long as Harding Evans has, to have someone stay so loyal and committed to their place of work. Not one person who works at HE can tell you about a time before Karen, because she has been here the longest! Karen has seen us go through office moves, office additions, change of ownerships and huge growth.

Mike Jenkins an Equity Partner at Harding Evans and Head of our Company and Commercial team commented: “Karen has been with us since the start of our incredible journey. 45 years ago, Harding Evans was a small High St practice with about 10 staff members. Today Harding Evans is a multi-award-winning legal practice with over 100 members of staff across our offices in Newport and Cardiff.  Congratulations, Karen, on your unswerving dedication and loyalty. A fantastic achievement”.

From all of us at Team HE, congratulations on your incredible milestone!