I told you a couple of weeks ago about my strategy for the second half of the year. I am now immersed in it, so that when folk ask me if I had a nice holiday, I have to think back for a moment to remember I was away - it all seems so long ago.

It strikes me now – I mean in the last few years, not just this autumn - that the practice of the law is actually a very good business to be in. OK, economic downturns affect everyone, and just as the Chancellor pines for the tax revenue lost when citizens are out of work, so the solicitor is wistful at the instructions not given because clients and potential clients are pulling their horns in and not buying that house, or leasing that shop. But people still die, steal, argue, need help of a wide variety of sorts. Besides that, one thing we don’t have is physical inventory. I watched a programme on TV about waste food, in which several telly chefs were set the task of bin-diving and hunting out waste and unwanted food from shops, dumpsters, market stalls, even private homes, to use it to put together a restaurant-class meal. Not only did they succeed, it was and is clear that millions of tons of perfectly edible food are thrown away every…well, day, week , month. Mis-shapen courgettes are verboten in supermarkets. A couple of extra centimetres on spring onions banish them to the pigswill or the bin. Perfectly good bread a day beyond its sell-by date is chucked out. When so much of the world’s population is starving, it is against morality if not the law to be so spendthrift with food.

Anyway I was not intending a rant. Having said that, I can hold the high ground to some extent at least. When we were growing up, every penny was a prisoner, and my mother simply would not allow anyone to leave the table with plates unpolished. Not that she needed to worry. My siblings and I were like wolves in consuming and coveting everything on the table. Elbows were used. Leave One For Mr. Manners? Stuff it, Mr Manners had better be quick or he won’t get one at all, serve him right the old duffer.

What I was intending was to be glad that one problem we don’t have in the legal profession is stock. Divorces don't go stale, conveyancing does not get thrown out and claims … well, they do time bar, but they don’t go out of style. We sell what is in our heads and in our computers and files. We don’t need to budget for how much to buy in and what wastage there may be. Indeed it could be worse in another way.

Department stores have shrinkage, which is the polite word for theft or shoplifting. I remember doing a show for BBC Radio investigating that very point, and it was frightening how much actual kit was going out the front door but not via the tills. You’d think the physical challenge of getting past the staff and the security with jackets, quilts, cutlery, cushions - you name it, would make the task have a built-in failure factor. But the opposite seems to true. And I don’t know about you, but I can always spot the store detective – the slim but determined looking woman clutching a handbag over one shoulder , fingering a rack of anoraks while looking in another direction totally. Always in flat shoes and trousers, for a quick sprint to pounce on the neds.

I sometimes say, when feeling fed up with my lot, that instead of being responsible for clients for years on end, sweating over deadlines, dates, money, service expectations, and never really being able to close a file, I would prefer a business in which someone comes in, they give me £6.95, I give them a pizza - any size, any topping - and the contract is complete. But in reality I know it would never be as simple as that – health and safety, environmental health, trading standards , making sure the delivery vehicles are legal, a customer getting food poisoning, drunk late-night customers being objectionable, staff stealing the pizzas and the cash – there would be challenges and frustrations - just different ones. And how many pizzas of any size or topping do you need to sell to make as much as you do for a single executry? More than the clapped out delivery moped can carry for sure.

Once a year I attend the law soc Sole Practitioner Conference in November. it is a fantastic CPD event, drawing together singletons of bewilderingly diverse practices - single hand conveyancers, employment folk, criminal lawyers, some old fashioned GP's, and one specialist music and entertainment guy (not me – I may be entertaining, but I know a limited amount about showbiz law). I round up the afternoon session with my chat on business practice and saving money, and it is gratifying that the hall has not totally emptied by the time I leap up to the podium. it is as much then as at any time that I recognise I have become less of a case and transaction lawyer, and more and more of an administrator and entrepreneur - more Duncan Bannatyne than Bannatyne Kirkwood France. I have succeeded in a relentless process of divesting myself of caseload, passing almost all work to colleagues, as I need the time to do everything from planning a client marketing campaign to a will database update to a website re-scripting (watch out for our super-duper all singing and dancing new site coming in September) to dealing with the rebuilding of Duke Street branch frontage after the stolen car smashed through it, to unblocking the lavvies at Giffnock blocked up by the kebab shop next door chucking their fat down the sink. Glamorous? It ain't. Pressurised? Yeah baby - feel the heat in my kitchen.

I look back and have difficulty believing where I have got to - and not in a good way. When I was at school , i was in the drama society, I was in the art class, I wanted to act and write and paint and dream. Such was the lack of careers advice in the mid 70's, I went to uni to do law like most of my year. Not unwillingly, just unchallengingly, if that's a word. The law was interesting - still is, but it was just too easy to follow the crowd, and indeed my dad, and play it safe. once I graduated, I took the apprentice place offered by my father's friend's firm, and just plodded along through qualification, assistantship at Ross Harper, and eventually dipping my toe into self-employment in the smallest law firm in east Kilbride. That point was 1987. and slowly, inexorably since then, the management, which amounted to about 5 minutes per week grew, eventually fuelled by an interest in and familiarity with IT (even in the days before computers you had to be able to type to work in a radio newsroom or TV department) and a slowly forming understanding that a law practice is a business, not just a series of clients and cases.

Talking of Ross Harper, we were partly responsible for shrinkage ant the local Marks & Spencers. Of a Friday after 5, we assistants used to congregate in Professor Harper's underground lair (seriously - it was like something Goldfinger might occupy) and crack open a couple of bottles of his vast wine cellar. Young as we were, we didn’t realise that some of the stuff we took cost more than one or two monthly salaries - to us it was for unwinding and comparing notes. Eileen Paterson used to bring in a couple of packets of potato deltas from M & S. Legitimately, I hasten to add. But one week a regular client was in the reception at around stopping time, and heard us asking who had brought the crisps this week? Quick as a flash he left the office, only to reappear with about 17 packets of chiplets, cheese tasters and salt'n'vinegar crisps which he dropped down (out of the inside of his voluminous coat) on to the reception counter. He was gently but firmly ushered out and warned as to his future conduct.

Ross of course was the ultimate lawyer-entrepreneur, and unashamedly so. As time went on, he became less of a physical presence at court, but a name that burgeoned as the number of offices and teams of assistants become the dominant species in the old Ingram Street court. I left the office every morning with a spine-wrenching slew of files for the sheriff and district courts and ran about pleading this, trying that and adjourning the other. You couldn't step into a courtroom without RHM having a share of the list.

I still find the business part of the profession to be a below-stairs status activity. Trainees prefer doing the client/casework to going on the excellent professional practice course. The new partners’ course is regarded too much as a necessary evil instead of an opportunity to get to grips with the underpinning of running a firm. Marketing is a word treated with contempt or ridicule.

But someone needs to get the clients in, balance the books and try to build a better mousetrap. The world does not stand still. That was why it was so astounding that when we did the high street practitioner roadshows in response to the downturn, so many partners of firms came along to the events - but just looked blankly at me when I ran through some obvious ways of getting existing clients back into the office and selling their services a bit.

This is what we are presently doing: Upgrading the website, reconfiguring our client management system so it captures client data for marketing more smoothly, training staff in looking for cross-selling opportunities, updating our will bank to see what clients should be advised about POA’s, IHT, will review, formulating new slicker conveyancing procedures, and revising our office practice manual for maximum efficiency and best practice. Most of that is not about the actual law, but all of it is important.

So my own conversion is just about complete. From being an artistic, dreaming teenager all the way to being a pure managing director immersed in finance, output and business development. From the soul to the brain. I may not be any much good at it, but it is my working life. And I enjoy it, which is the bizarre thing.

As for shrinkage? My waistline could frankly do with a bit of shoplifting.

And you’re still wondering – did we eat the blagged crisps? I couldn’t possibly comment.

Austin