Michael Dunn kicked off his career as a trainee at Morton Fraser, but soon felt like a fish out of water. After spending time in Europe he finally discovered his forte as an interior designer. Dunn speaks to The Firm about his life after law.

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Michael Dunn is a whirlwind. A pure, concentrated dose of energy. An epicurean. An entrepreneur. A bon viveur. Likes his coffee, too.  Thirty minutes in his company is like a caffeine shot, personified. Leaving his company, one feels quite invigorated, and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the legal profession just simply isn’t big enough to accommodate him.  How on earth could it?

He saw this himself almost as soon as he qualified, completing his traineeship at Morton Fraser Milligan in the 1980s, where he was seconded to their Brussels office, during which time he studied the French language at Abelard’s Sorbonne, met Lucia, studying there as an alumnus of the university of Venice – to whom he is now married- slotted in to her family’s furniture export business, at which time he said a neat goodbye to the law, and has frankly never looked back.

“When I worked at Morton Fraser Milligan, I realised it wasn’t for me,” he says. “I felt like I was a round peg in a square hole. But I committed to it, I enjoyed doing it. I am very proud of the relationship I had with the people at Morton Fraser. You are learning the basics of going to work every morning and being responsible. But I always felt that my talents lay somewhere else,”

“When I spent time in Paris it was the first time I slowed down long enough to think about what I really wanted to so. The more people I met, the more I realised that I hadn’t really lived that much. I didn’t want to spend my time doing things I didn’t feel I would be very good at.”       

It is hard to believe that there is a great deal Dunn wouldn’t be good at, but the more he reveals of himself, it is clear that his own definition of being ‘good’ at something, is what most people would define as exceptional.  Boundary breaking lawyer Olivia Giles was one of his peers; other contemporaries have moved into chairmanships or to head up offices at Pinsent Masons and Maclay Murray Spens. Perhaps a lucrative legal career may have been Dunn’s path in a parallel universe, but the sliding doors of life took Dunn on a route that was distinctively different from his post-qualifying peers.

“I was not on the same track as they were. I am a natural salesman. My personality and passion is with people. That has lent itself to building up relationships of trust. In motivating a team, identifying opportunities. I am not really a committee man. I enjoy being my own boss in control of my destiny,

“It didn’t feel right. But because I had gone through my degree and diploma I decided I should follow through with that. It shows I can commit and finish a job I started. It was a good discipline.”

Michael’s grandfather started the family business, Dunn and Moore, beloved of fizzy drink loving Glasgow schoolchildren for generations. So it could be argued that he comes from pioneering stock. Leaving Brussels and Paris, Dunn moved to Venice, working for six months with Lucia’s family’s family export business.  In this role, his own personality, character and drive seemed more naturally suited. 

Quickly marrying up the fact that Dunn and Moore were distributing soft drinks to 3500 licensed premises, and that the family business had no presence in Scotland, he found himself responsible for exporting bespoke office furniture to the Scottish licensed trade, a niche market which has snowballed to include office refurbishments, which is the basis of his current business, Dunn Interiors. His client base now includes Hilton Hotels, Maclays Inns, Café Gandolfi, Glasgow’s Gamba restaurant.  Countless more.  If you enjoy the finer things in life, chances are you have sat in many of his chairs already.  

Dunn himself now lives in his grandfather’s former home, which he has renovated.  He also has a home in Venice, another a little further north in the Italian Dolomites. He and Lucia are raising four children, Francesca, Valentina, Guiseppe and Olympia.  He is on first name terms with the owner of the restaurant where we meet, and one suspects, with a great many others, too.

He is a barrel of energy, the kind that is not too often encountered among circles of lawyers. Somehow that sense of not quite fitting the mould of a lawyer kicked him into action and roused him out of the profession, and if it hadn’t been via the route he ultimately took, it seems certain he would have left the law by another channel, sooner or later.  There are plenty like him; we‘ve all met them, and there are an awful lot of ex-lawyers out there, such as Morton Fraser alumnus Gerry Butler, screen writer Paul Laverty, and Bird Semple’s Elspeth Talbot, who have left the law to plough other furrows. Sometimes literally. But all too often they remain in a constricting profession. Why?

“People procrastinate and don’t like change,” ventures Dunn.  “I also saw a lot of people who were trapped in the law, and sitting on properties and flats as the escalating price of houses in Edinburgh went through the roof, and interest rates went up to 16%. There were people handcuffed to the job of being a lawyer who didn’t want to be lawyer. What job could they possibly move to? They were married, engaged, had a mortgage and leaving was almost not an option to them. I think a lot of people have been trapped in the law,” he says.

However, he rails at then notion that financial security should ever be an impediment to an ambitious young lawyer becoming shackled by that same chain of financial certainty that transforms from alluring and desirable, to confining. “There was no financial security. I was getting fuck all. We were on six or seven grand a year, and I was going into battle with Ken Pritchard on behalf of the SYLA to get the basic trainee salary rate up. There was no attraction for me being in law. The idea of having to stick in and go for partnership, with a view to making in ten years time what I thought was a relatively low salary for the effort they were putting in didn’t stack up for me. I knew in my heart of hearts that my talents could be put to a much more productive use,”

“You have to play to your strengths. Having no commitments, I wasw able to be flexible and go and do my thing in France and Italy. I didn’t want to try and be something that I don’t think I am. I think there are a lot of people in law firms all over Scotland who wished they were doing something else.”

Are you one of them?  If so, and if you don’t take Michael Dunn’s advice, ask yourself this, what would you like to be plucked from you cold, dead hand?  A quill pen, a briefcase and your practising certificate; or something else? Something more particularly ‘You’? Judging from his demeanour and energy, he seems to have the right recipe.