A festive greeting to you all. Members of the Law Society of Scotland, advocates, sheriffs and judges, academics, general readers and friends everywhere – a merry Christmas and happy new year to one and all.

It has been a towsy 2011 – legal aid cuts, the continuing challenge of ABS, the new constitution with its difficult gestation. Yet there has been a lot of good. Lots of firms reinventing themselves, better business practice shoring up changing markets, determination to survive - and even thrive - with excellence as the main remedial tool. Our lawyers are actually bloody good at what they do.

Nothing is certain or safe – but in that we’re no different from any other profession or trade. Ironically/sadly, I have had a fair few transactions arising from clients reducing, selling, reorganising their own businesses. But it has been paid work. In my VP duties I have had face time with the biggest to the smallest firms, and just as it was in the good days, there is always more that we have in common than separates us. The challenges of the one-man criminal practice are ultimately not so different from the worries of the Edinburgh firm with hunners of fee earners. It’s about meeting client needs in an efficient and profitable way.

Solicitors in Scotland are a funny lot. They are assiduous in protecting and enhancing their clients’ interests. But as for their own businesses? Change and innovation tend to be at the point of a gun, with an instinct not to move with the times other than only when alternatives fail. But then solicitors do change. I well remember when I opened my first office in East Kilbride in 1987. I was the first firm to have a fax in our building in Edinburgh House. I charged other firms £1 a page faxing out, 50p a page received. It took only a matter of weeks for the rest to get their own fax machines and the rest, as they say, is history.

The point is this – solicitors are a cautious breed, which is mainly a good thing. But it means we tend to be reactive, rather than at the cutting edge of beneficial change. But think more widely: Steve Jobs, Alan Sugar, James Dyson, Mark Zuckerberg, Damian Hirst, Tom Hunter – their starting-off point was always to ask what could be done to make a good or a service better. Not to preserve what they already had or knew, but to push the boundaries further. So if I have one observation/criticism of the legal profession in this country, it is that we do not always embrace entrepreneurialism, and put it front and centre.

This is probably a wider issue than a purely solicitor one. In Scotland the “kent his faither” ethos is deeply ingrained. As an aside, that said, a lot of older solicitors did ken my faither, and he was maybe not an innovator, but he was also (the original) Austin Lafferty, and was a personality, a showman if you will (he loved doing jury trials and always wore - in the days of pinstriped trousers and black jackets as a uniform - grey slacks, a blue blazer, a yellow shirt and colourful tie, to “show my intense contempt for the judicial establishment”) and open to the broadest of ideas.

But my ambition, both personally and also as an Office Bearer of the Law Society of Scotland, in 2012 is to promote that spirit of excellence, innovation and entrepreneurialism that the profession needs and deserves. I want to excoriate defeatism, negativity and the spirit of blame that threatens us. I have heard, read and been privy to the thrusts of distrust, accusation and bile arising out of the various problems the profession faces, and I just won’t have it. In the most contentious of disputes and cases, I always treat the opposing solicitor with courtesy and amicable co-operation. Indeed a very wise client of mine says “ ye get mair with sugar than ye dae wi’ shite” and that has been the bedrock of my practice. I have found time and again that this pays.

It is not easy. Attitudes can easily become entrenched, various wagons have been put in circles. But as I veer towards presidency, the issues become sharper again in focus. A dear professional friend of mine said last year that I would have to get my hands dirty and could not satisfy everyone. Absolutely right, but the stakes are high , and it’s worth the effort.

So we’ll see. I have now resigned from the editorial board of the Firm as I must be independent of the articles with which I agree and don’t agree, but I will continue here to say what I think and let you make of it what you will.

I remain open to all responses and approaches, for and agin’ me. It is only in adversity that we grow and learn. It would be inappropriate to quote St Francis of Assisi, not least because that coinage has, rightly or wrongly, been debased by Mrs. Thatcher. But hear this – all I ever want is to do my best for my beloved profession and its clients.

Join me.

Austin