This obituary for Frank Handy is provided by a LawFuel contributor
The death at 91 of Francis Joshua Handy brings to end one of the more remarkable and colourful New Zealand legal-commercial careers of recent times.
From the South Island Frank Handy was a son of the Manse and throughout his life constantly displayed the seriousness of his upbringing, which as he grew older became tempered by an infectious laugh and deliberate irreverence.
In the event he eschewed a vocation in the church for a more worldly one in the New Zealand Treasury.
In a surprise career curve he suddenly quit the public sector for the private one, starting off as a law clerk for Scott Morrison.
Frank Handy had graduated in 1957 MA from Victoria University and then in 1968 LLB
His marriage in 1965 to Lyndsey Watts, daughter of Jack Watts, a defining National Government Minister of Finance, accelerated the young Handy’s progression in his freshly chosen field.
After several years with Scott Morrison he now became a partner in his father-in-law’s firm, Watts & Patterson.
Jack Watts, after leaving Parliament, had begun his own legal partnership with Colin Patterson.
In a gesture which some saw as a Quixotic one to his new father- in- law Frank Handy in 1969 stood as National Party candidate for Petone then as now a Labour stronghold.
Watts & Patterson as a partnership now began to organise around high-end legal contractual assignments, notably around the motor trade.
The firm eventually became MinterEllisonRuddWatts in 2001, with the name change recognising the partnership between Rudd Watts and Stone and the MinterEllison Legal Group.
When Frank Handy joined the partnership its association with the motor trade which in turn had led to a global resources orientation positioned the firm for the advent of the Taranaki-based era of oil and gas exploration, symbolised by the Maui offshore drilling.
Frank Handy became the point man for the firm’s association with this project so he and his family left Wellington to live in New Plymouth.
He worked directly with the Shell BP Todd consortium on its contracting for leases and then for the exploration and production hardware in the form of rigs, supply boats and platforms required to bring the nation’s new offshore wealth to the marketplace.
With his urbanely extrovert boyish persona and ready chortle blended with an imposing and measured demeanour Frank Handy was the calming legal mind to smooth over administrative and operational differences and unite in their common purpose the head office types and the tool pusher deep sea operatives.
The conclusion of the Maui era saw him reluctant to return to Wellington and to its inevitably more routine emphasis on commercial work.
Instead he repositioned himself and his family in Aberdeen, then as now the hub of North Sea oil.
With the heyday of North Sea oil now in view Frank Handy re-established himself in Auckland with his old partnership.
Rather later he returned to Wellington to fill the gap left by his brother-in- law the late Julian Watts who had departed for London to become the company secretary for BP.
An ardent sportsman Frank Handy was a regular at the Heretaunga Golf Club. He never lost his hankering for ecclesiastical music
With the conclusion of his corporate career he insisted on retaining his practising certificate and now established himself as a sole practitioner, a kind of store front attorney, in the landmark Hibernian Society building on Wellington’s Bond Street.
Here he plunged enthusiastically into the world of emigres and residential rights and others at the wrong end of the social income spectrum. He finally quit practising in 2022.
He is survived by his wife Lyndsey and their three children.
Pity the obituary didnt mention his time as a lecturer in Auckland university – and I think he worked in MFA not Treasury?