Firefighter, roughneck, surveyor, trainee lawyer and nascent networking specialist Steven Latta blogs for The Firm

One nursery rhyme for the Noughties might read:

“Easy Jet, Easyjet something aint right,
How can the sandwich cost more than the flight?”

And some might say “something aint right” here, either. A trainee?  Voicing his opinions and airing his observations on The Firm’s website. A trainee???

It has to be said, though, that my profile is not that of a typical new entrant to the profession. My route into Law has been somewhat ‘indirect’.

Four and a half years as a crash/ rescue firefighter in the Royal Air Force was followed by two years working as a roughneck on North Sea oil rigs before completing my first degree, a BSc in Land Economics.

I then went onto work in the property industry for eight years during which time I qualified as a Chartered Surveyor and, by evening study, completed post graduate qualifications at Glasgow Uni.

I am now a second year trainee with a medium sized firm of commercial solicitors based in Glasgow. I also sit on the committee of the Scottish Young Lawyers Association (SYLA) and on the equivalent body for the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) in the West of Scotland.

The extra-curricular activities are very important, of course. Having worked in the professions I am only too aware of the importance of maintaining and developing my network of contacts. However, as a newcomer to the law, who wasn’t client-facing, the question was: how do I go about it? I am not much of a drinker and have absolutely no interest in golf whatsoever.

In fact, to me, Tiger Woods just sounds like a really dangerous place to have a picnic.

Back in December I decided to take the direct approach and contacted the RICS, the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) and the SYLA with a view to organising an inter-professional networking event in Glasgow. The week before Christmas I caught up with my new contacts for the first time and within a month we had secured funding for the event from international property advisors Drivers Jonas and from CIMA themselves.

The invites went out at the end of February and we had around 400 requests for tickets. The event was over-subscribed three-fold. I had between 60-70 solicitors and trainees on the ‘reserve’ list. The idea seemed to have grabbed everyone’s imagination; a much more efficient way of networking. The potential awkwardness in networking is eliminated when the whole rationale of the evening was to meet other professionals.

I had been to loads of such surveying events in the past where, in effect, you were networking with the competition. More often than not I would come away from the event with nothing more than gossip about who got up to what after the previous event.

Our event offered, to borrow an overused term from my Scottish Enterprise days, a genuine “platform for synergies”, an opportunity for the development of collaborative relationships with professionals from other professions with whom there was a real prospect of doing business at some point in the future.

The event took place on the last Thursday of March and was a great success. Indeed the start was delayed as we allowed the queue, which snaked down the stairway of ‘One Up’ and out into Royal Exchange Square, to make their way in to the venue.

My favourite anecdote of the night was about the two young ladies, at the start of a night out, who joined the queue convinced that they had happened upon some emerging uber-trendy pre-club destination. Why else, I suppose, would all these young ‘suits’ queue up in the street to get into a bar?

One of my accountant friends assures me that they were actually in the building and halfway up the stairs before they believed him that it was just an event for some accountants, lawyers and surveyors.

Perhaps this is how Peter Stringfellow got started?

Steven

PS: watch this space for details of forthcoming events