Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Jaesen, Sarah and the team at Ford Sumner wish you all the best for the holiday season.
2020 was a year like no other! We hope you get to relax and enjoy the festive season with family and friends. We look forward to seeing and working with you in 2021.
2020 at Ford Sumner
Whilst 2020 threw many challenges at all of us, it’s important to reflect upon and remember the good stuff too, so here is a summary of a few of the highlights of our year.
Sarah’s news
We are pleased to announce that, in early December, Sarah gave birth to her second child – a baby boy. Sarah and her family are doing well and Sarah will be back in the office in March 2021. In the meantime, Jaesen, Jono and the rest of the team will look after you.
New team members
This year we had four fantastic additions to our team:
Sean Potter, Lawyer - Sean joined the team as a law clerk in early January before being admitted to the bar in June. He is now a practising lawyer across our medico-legal area and commercial practise. He is also heavily involved in the development of our automated documents.
Allie Donoghue-Hunt, Administration Assistant - Allie joined the team only a few weeks before lockdown. It was a difficult time to start a new role, but she rose to the challenge and worked with the team remotely supporting us in finding new ways of doing things.
Sharee Cavanaugh, Senior Associate – We welcomed Sharee to the team in July. Sharee specialises in dispute resolution and employment law and brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the team.
Amanda Lamb, Lawyer – Amanda was another great addition to our team of lawyers. She has joined our commercial team, but helps out across other specialty areas of the firm also.
New little ‘team’ members
Within the team we welcomed two new babies this year. Along with Sarah’s baby boy, Briar (our Office Manager) gave birth to baby Ella in August.
Covid-19 and the lockdown period
Along with the rest of the world, we endured unprecedented times in 2020. However, through the testing period of Covid-19, the lockdown and all of the challenges that brought, there were many positives. It was a great lesson in the magic of kindness and helping each other out. We are extremely proud of the resilience our team showed adapting and managing through the year with lockdowns, remote working and finding new ways of doing things. We know you were all in the same position - it was a stressful year for so many of our clients and we were happy to be able to help out where we could.
Birthday party
Many of you know that we didn’t hold our annual birthday party this year. We hope that we can celebrate in style again in 2021. In lieu of our birthday celebrations this year, we gave a donation to Big Buddy. We chose to support this charity as it holds an important place in the hearts of one of our awesome clients who has been with us from the start.
Ocean Swim series
Ford Sumner continues to be a proud sponsor of the Banana Boat Ocean Swim series. Scott and his team are fantastic to work with and their values around the positive impact events like this can have on people’s lives, as well as looking after our oceans and coastlines, align with our own.
We continue to be grateful for the support of our wonderful swim coach Dougal Dunlop who works with the FS team every week to help and encourage us to achieve our individual swimming goals.
We are so impressed by the efforts of our team to give it a go. The FS team will be taking part in a few of the events around the country this summer. The list of events can be found here. Get in touch if you would like to join us.
Christmas close down period
Our office closes on Wednesday 23rd December at 1pm and will reopen at 8.30am on Monday 11th January 2021. During that time you can contact Jaesen Sumner on 021 523 736 or Jaesen@fsl.nz if you need urgent assistance.
In lieu of Christmas cards and gifts, we have made a donation to The Wellington City Mission. Funds from The Wellington City Mission’s Light up Wellington go toward supporting individuals and families in need this Christmas. Our star is now on the Walk of Fame down on the Wellington waterfront near Te Papa.
