The Law Society has crowned its sexagesimal year with the appointment of Chief Executive Lorna Jack, at a time when the organisation faces serious challenges to its relevance and position in legal life. Steven Raeburn catches up with the woman charged with taking the organisation forward and ensuring the Law Society’s continued existence for another sixty years, in the face of unprecedented change and upheaval.

There was another new incumbent taking office at the pinnacle of a large political institution in January, and although Lorna Jack’s inception in post as Chief Executive of the Law Society was not heralded with pizzazz or overblown ceremony, the change at the top of the organisation is every bit as symbolic as her comparator in the Washington White House.

It shouldn’t be significant that she is the first woman in the role. But it is, and there is no avoiding it. There are few “firsts” left for women in law to achieve, as her illustrious predecessors Lady Paton, Elish Angiolini, Caroline Docherty, Linda Urquhart and Westminster’s Patricia Scotland have all proven. But unlike them, Lorna Jack does not come from within the ranks of the legal profession. With a background in business first and foremost, Jack is a trained Chartered Accountant, with spells as Head of National Food Industry Team, Scottish Enterprise, Head of Global Companies Research Project, Scottish Enterprise and CEO for Scottish Enterprise Forth Valley on her CV. Her position prior to taking up post as Chief Executive of Edinburgh’s venerable -and some would say dislocated or even schizophrenic- Law Society, was in Boston as President Americas of Scottish Development International. From the outset, she is bound to offer a different perspective. Although she is the first to point out that neither her background in accountancy or in particular her gender should have any bearing on her approach to the role.

“It is a bit of a sterile argument. There are people within the legal profession who are great leaders, and I think this role is about leadership. Being a qualified chartered accountant doesn’t matter,” she says.

“As long as you can grasp what this is about, and the change you need to move forward together with some of the office bearers is what is important. I think I come with fresh perspective, particularly because I have been operating overseas. And I’m up for asking some questions about why we do things in particular ways.”

But what exactly is it she is supposed to do?  This perhaps has been the essential question underlying much of the difficulties the Law Society has experienced since the profession modernised and moved away from operating a pure partnership model, with the modes of practice and anachronistic obsequiousness that it engendered. Practitioners in smaller firms, and in particular those in outlying areas furth of Edinburgh, maintain that the organisation is remote and does not represent their interests in the way that it once did.  Larger commercial firms, especially those based in Edinburgh, may have benefited from the accessibility and proximity of the warm embrace of their Law Society, but in uncertain commercial times, the organisation may be struggling to secure its niche in the longer term.  However, it is the long view that Lorna Jack is looking towards, and she believes in getting down to business immediately.

“There is an important job in shepherding the organisation for the long term, but the role is about taking action now, and ensuring that we can do the important job of regulation and representation in this new environment,” she says.

“It is becoming much more diverse than maybe it was when the society was established 60 years ago. Clearly the profession are so different every time you look at that ten year horizon. Going back twenty years, there would have been 3,000 members of this organisation; now there are 10,000, doing very different specialisms. Therefore we have to be constantly looking ahead, figuring out how we need to change as an organisation to support that, so that the public and the profession have confidence in us.”

Her predecessor Douglas Mill held the Chief Executive’s position for eleven years, and that was the shortest tenure of anyone in the post. Given the rotating presidency of the Society, it is understandable that there are difficulties in maintaining continuity. It is also well known that some incumbents of the President’s role maintain their client caseload during their tenure, and treat the role as rather more of an honorarium than those who grasp it full time and use their tenure to stamp their style and personality on the profession and its structures. One imagines that this might leave the more established Chief Executive rather bemused, if not a little frustrated each year, particularly if the Chief Executive’s style and talents do not marry neatly with the incumbent office bearers.  It is a potential clash that Jack anticipates she will find easy to avoid.

“The President is there to represent the profession, and I am there to lead the organisation,” she says.

“I’d expect the president to be representing policy issues and debating legal issues with the profession.  I am here to ensure the executive are in behind and delivering to each of our constituents, like a chairman and chief executive in the corporate sector.  I don’t immediately see any clash of representation issues. Getting beyond personalities, we have to work with all types of individuals, and therefore I am equipped and ready to think about different people in the role of President. 

“The important thing is that the right spokesperson is out there for whatever the issue is.  Visibility goes beyond interviewing and being in the papers. It is about who you go out and see. Because it is such a massive, complex map for this organisation, you could share it out amongst all the office bearers and still not do enough. I think it is about us being smart and ensuring that we are out talking. That’s very typical of the Chair/Chief Exec type role in the private sector. It is like a double act.”

The challenges ahead for Lorna Jack extend far beyond office politics. The schism between the conveyancing branch of the profession and the Law Society over the issue of Home Reports neatly illustrates how wide the gulf can be between what solicitors actually want and how they prefer to work, and what the Law Society does on their behalf. Some 79% of respondents told The Firm that Home Reports were not working, and in a vote at the Law Society ahead of their launch, Home Reports were outvoted by a margin of 40-1. Yet the solicitors’ collegiate body did not stand in the way of their introduction.

“Some of that is also symptomatic of the specialisation. If you try to look at what is homogenous across this profession, the thing that binds them is their professional standing, code of conduct and professional practice,” Jack says.

“What they actually do every day is very different. They just do different things, and therefore it is very hard to get somebody to be bothered about an issue that isn’t impacting on them immediately. That is where we need to work a bit harder at understanding each of these membership groups and what is uppermost in their agenda, and ensuring it gets appropriate attention. As an organisation we need to invite feedback in from these groups so that we are asking what the most important issues are. The critical thing is, are we talking to enough constituents within the profession, and understanding what we need to be doing to be working positively?”

It may not be directly related, but Chief Executives and senior solicitors have told The Firm that the entire solicitor model is likely to change in the medium term, with many of the 10,000 practitioners electing not to pay their subscriptions or renew their practicing certificates and therefore leaving the Law Society membership behind, if they are not working in the core areas that require notarisation of writs or execution of warrant. Certificates would be retained by only the few who actually need them. The potential cost saving to large partner firms, where this is already happening in embryo, could be sufficient to denude the Law Society of its membership and raison d’etre. Ensuring the relevance of the Society, and possibly even its existence, are likely to become the key challenges for Jack as she fully settles into the coal face work of the role.

“The profession I saying to us that it is diverse and asking how we will respond,” she says.

“In-house lawyers look very different because many of them are sitting in the public sector at national and local level, some are in large corporates that are going through all sorts of difficulties just now. They are all looking to us to find out what more we can do for them as we move forward. It is valid for us to say that we have value to deliver back, and let’s move that on.

“In our stakeholder group, people like the government, as representatives of the public, want to show that we have moved on in terms of our governance and regulation to ensure that the public’s interest as consumers of legal services is protected. We’re not alone. We have a terrific group of members who are prepared to roll their sleeves up and get in and help do that. It is not just down to the officers and executive within the organisation. It is a huge time of unprecedented change for the profession, and that is what attracted me into it.”

Lorna Jack also disagrees with the suggestion that the priorities of the Law Society may have become too closely aligned with the priorities of the Scottish Government in post-devolution Scotland.

“I understood that the Law Society fell out with Government over complaints, so that would suggest to me that we weren’t in the Government’s pocket, and weren’t close enough to where their thinking was going,” she says.

“We need to be balancing the tricky act of being a good regulator, representing the profession as well as the public’s interest - and being connected to all our stakeholders, including government and those who have a big role in the economy. That is a big group to corral, and you can’t please all the people all of the time.

“As long as we are constantly talking though. The worst thing you can do is fall out with any of those stakeholders. Sometimes we’ll win through on an argument with the Government or the public. Sometimes we won’t. It’s just part of life. The important thing is that we are equipped to have the dialogue and are working through the issues so we can try and balance those things.  There is a link between professional standards and their regulation. They are interlinked and should be together. Professions that can balance those things out enjoy good relations with their stakeholders and their members. It is a very complex picture in this sector.”

Jack already seems very comfortable in the role, and exudes a confidence that does not seem misplaced. Her ability and willingness to get out and about and take on a visible role for the profession is undoubtedly a factor that was crucial in her selection. The profession is entering into a time of unprecedented unpredictability and wobblyness. A time when it is important for everyone in the profession to be talking.