Adelaide woman hits longest-serving staff state record
When Sharon Richardson started her career at an Adelaide law firm, she was only 15 years old. Now her bosses think she has earned a place in the state’s history books.
On July 31, 2026, Sharon Richardson will step out of the doors as a valued staff member of Andersons Solicitors on Lipson Street in Port Adelaide for the very last time.
Her retirement caps off a long-term innings with the firm that specialises in family law, personal injury claims, wills and estates.
Richardson was just 15 when she joined the Port Adelaide law firm, first starting as the personal secretary to the business founder Paul Anderson.
Since then, she has spent 54 years with the company, with the firm claiming it makes her one of South Australia’s longest-serving employees behind Effie Catsas, who worked at Munno Para Foodland for 61 years.
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Richardson, who turned 70 last Wednesday, told InDaily she was proud to have clocked up such a monumental amount of time with one company at a time when average Australians change jobs every two years and nine months, according to CareerSidekick research.
And she had seen massive changes in technology during her career; when she started at 15 she was using an electric typewriter. She had since seen computers introduced and was retiring as artificial intelligence was embedding itself in businesses across the world.
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“[AI] is probably going to take my job anyway,” joked Richardson.
“I’m able to get out now while I can.”
Richardson said she was “petrified” heading to the first interview for the secretary position. Aged just 15 years old and in her fourth year of school at Thebarton Tech Girls High, she was taken to the interview by her mother.
“Mum came to the interview with me, I had the interview with Paul Anderson and then I got sat in front of this electric typewriter,” she said.
“I thought, ‘Oh my God, what on earth is this?’. We certainly didn’t have electric typewriters and I had to do this typing test on this thing that I’d never seen before.”
After being sent to an employment agency to complete a typing test on a manual typewriter, Richardson was told she was too young, too slow and had no experience.
“Thankfully, Paul didn’t listen to them,” she said. The following Tuesday, she started work at Andersons Solicitors.
She joined the firm when there were just three solicitors, three secretaries and a Rounds Clerk who caught the bus into the city from Port Adelaide to lodge documents by hand.
Richardson eventually got the hang of the electric typewriter and wrote wills from scratch using carbon paper for copies.
By 18, Richardson ran the firm’s office as its senior secretary, and said she was one of the first people in Adelaide trained on Olympus computer technology in the late 1970s.
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Over the following decades, she worked under four managing partners and five general managers, and watched the company grow from the Port Adelaide practice into what it is today with offices in Adelaide, Morphett Vale, Murray Bridge, Nuriootpa, Port Adelaide and Woodville.
She estimated she would have trained “hundreds and hundreds” of staff coming into the firm over the years.
Richardson told InDaily it was the people that kept her at Andersons.
“I was very lucky with the people I worked with,” she said.
“I’ve enjoyed what I do.
“Paul Anderson was the only one… that’s been here longer. Even the equity partners – I was here before any of the equity partners were probably even thought of.”
And her legacy will continue, with her son, Leigh, currently working at Andersons. He had clocked up 21 years at the firm to date, first as a Rounds Clerk and then in the accounts department.
But she was excited for retirement, telling InDaily she wanted to spend time focusing on crafts.
She also had a trip planned to drive up the east coast of Australia with her husband, saying a previous attempt to do the drive was scuttled when Covid-19 locked the country down in 2020.
“No alarm going off at 5.50 in the morning will be lovely,” she said.
“But I’ll miss the people most, the friendships I’ve made and our longstanding clients.”
Andersons Solicitors managing partner Felix Hoelscher said Richardson’s career was “without parallel” in the company’s history.
“Sharon hasn’t just worked at Andersons for 54 years. She helped build it,” he said.
“Her presence at Andersons is irreplaceable, and we will miss her very much.”
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