Utilising his full armoury of soft skills, Austin explains why EK Law is more like LA Law than it might at first appear.

I don’t know what day you’ll read this but I am writing it on a Friday at about 5 pm. at least you’ll know I have survived – physically and professionally – another week. Once done, I will put on the office alarm, turn the key in the door, and trudge wearily home.

A media friend , who knows me as nothing really more than a guy he used to do tv and radio shows with, asked me in all innocence if I am just about retired. I knew what he meant – like the much-loved crooner and solicitor Peter Morrison, the less loved but more lusted after Gerard Butler, and sundry other legal types – Clive Anderson, the late John Mortimer, Hillary Clinton – I am to some people better known for my non-legal output than my solicitation. Unlike the abovementioned however, I have not left the law and gone into music, Hollywood hunkery, chat/panel show business, authorship or international politics – to take them in their order. No, I am still a solicitor in private practice running my firm.

It’s funny – when I was doing my weekly tv phone-in the 8 minutes of exposure burned itself into the population’s recognition more than 70 hours a week being a lawyer. And I am not boasting. I was the smallest of bit-part players on the screen in Scotland for several years but such is the power of television, it created for many folk – and many I worked with closely – the appearance that I was technically a lawyer but mainly a tv performer.

The reality was and is much more prosaic. Any of you who have run or worked in private practice knows the pressure, tension, worry and sheer relentless bloody hard work it is. Mind I am not running down other areas of law – I am only speaking of what I am familiar with.

I was always a solicitor first and a radio and tv guy …well, about ninth. And I am still working as hard, though in a queer way the question or assumption has an underlying truth – but a different one. I am only partly a lawyer now, and a diminishing part at that. Here’s what I mean.

This week’s activities have included:

Dealing with commercial neighbours and the local authority environmental health department as the restaurants and takeaways nearby have either caused or exacerbated a RAT problem ( Euggh!!) at our back court. In spite of me being blameless, I am to arrange and stump up my share for the pest controllers to slaughter Roland and his clan. I have also been arranging PAT tests on all the electronic equipment in 4 branches, commencing the creation of a new state-of-the-art health and safety policy for the firm, supervising the trainee doing the postings in the ledger while the cashier is on holiday, ordering new deskage for one branch, dealing with a complaint from a slightly mad, bad and dangerous to know estate agency client (which wasn’t really a complaint – she was unhappy my agent had the temerity to ask her to stop shouting at him…), renewing the fire extinguishers in another branch, chairing a client relations committee at the Law Society of Scotland, talking to our web designer about changes to the site (have a look at it, getting slicker: www.austinlafferty.co.uk) , planning destruction of hundreds of files that are past the date for it , and, er, writing a blog for the Firm – plus a million other things that have nothing directly to do with representing clients.

Now don’t get me wrong, I also do fee-earning work as well. But a reducing amount , as even a small firm like mine with its 16 employees needs a hell of a lot of management, and in these troubled times you have to think and plan and plot and develop hugely just to be sure you’re not going to come a cropper or have to deal with a financial crisis. My end of legal practice is only partly about being a solicitor. Indeed in order to allow my qualified colleagues to be solicitors, I have to, or have elected to, be the business manager, chief cook and bottle washer.

You’ll remember LA Law, the glitzy American tv series about Mckenzie Brackman and its partners and opponents. I loved it, but they each seemed ever to only have one case on at any time. Good for the dramatic structure of the show, but pathetic when compared to the real coalface we all know with phones going and clients queuing out at the door. But the point I make is this: in one episode, Douglas Brackman , the comic foil in most stories, was the managing partner. His colleagues goaded him and ridiculed him for not bringing in big fees or going out to court, and laughing at him for being no more than king of the paperclips. So to get back at them he went on strike. Stopped managing. And, just like the bin men in Edinburgh, it is only when they’re not there that you miss them. The lawyers at Mckenzie Brackman found they could not function without toilet paper, relief typing staff, diary management …paperclips. Lesson learned.

That was in the 1980’s. I found it amusing and instructive at the time, but now – perhaps even more so as I am as bald as Brackman, equally dashing and handsome, and know his pain completely. Whether or not my staff appreciate it, without me arranging for the lavvies to be cleaned, or the Professional Indemnity forms to be done, or the computers to be working, they would all be out of a job.

But let me tell you the weird thing. I …. actually enjoy it. Although student and trainee lawyers are taught ethics and accounts and loads of essential stuff, until you have a real firm under the saddle between your thighs ( the editor will probably cut that bit out) you don’t know the joys and terrors of command. Just like any company making things, selling things, managing things, a legal firm is a business, and as Gordon Ramsay said this week when talking about his ups and (huge) downs in the restaurant empire, There’s No Script. You develop your firm using your own ability, instinct, judgment, limitations. You learn from the mistakes and you thrive on the successes. The solicitor’s traditional description is the man /woman of business – though it is one thing to advise a client on his/her business, a different thing to run your own.

I have learned a number of fundamental lessons and feel that at least I now know what works – for my firm at least – keep borrowings down, do nothing on a whim – i.e. be dull and almost anal in your anal(!)ysis of all the factors, limit your work to what you know, be strong enough to turn away clients and cases you don’t like, learn how to be an employer, be aware of the need to market your services. And more. And most importantly – don’t be Royal Bank of Scotland or its like.

Indeed there is much more, as the red tape and bureaucracy surrounding any business is intense and growing, no matter the aspirations/spin of all political parties. It was never enough to be just a good lawyer. Indeed you can be a poorish lawyer but commercially successful, and a great one and do no more than tread water. And the rise of IT has led to new additional essentials in management skills. I am these days the geekiest of computer nerds you can get, and act as an internal consultant to the staff when they need to know how to insert one bit of info into a larger bit of info, or they can’t get their attachments to attach, or they lose their internet connection, or even when they spill coffee on their keyboards. The other day the BT router at one office went down, and saddo that I am, I had a spare one. My IT suppliers get me to demo their kit to other lawyers such is my slavering enthusiasm for data management. I just need a set of dental braces and a tank top and I am the complete wombat.

I now assiduously read the business pages in the papers , and it is remarkable how easy it is to adapt the issues in a company story to my own experience. I think in terms of balance sheet and profit and loss accounts, I know all my overheads within an inch of their lives and can assess the profitability of a branch or an assistant accurately. And if I am making this sound as if I am pleased with myself, it is certainly not that – I am well aware of my limitations as a manager and entrepreneur – but I actually get a huge buzz out of my work.

So 5 o’ clock it is, and let me revise my description. I won’t be trudging home. Not quite skipping, but perhaps something in between. Indeed maybe I will be running , like the running dog capitalist I am confessing to be. And proud of it. As for retirement planning? You know the music hall joke – old lawyers never die, they only lose their appeal.

Austin