I am retiring from private practice with Coulters Legal LLP on 30 April 2021, forty years after I started my legal career as one of the first batch of trainees. We had been touted by the Law Society as more practical and more “oven ready” than the apprentices; this expectation was, at least in my case, hard to match.

It would be trite to comment that a lot has changed over those forty years; but I thought some memories of those early years would bring home to SLN readers just how much has changed. It goes without saying that we had no computers, no mobile phones, and the concept of a paperless office was impossible to imagine. We didn’t send deeds digitally to the registers; we sent trainees on the Meadowbank bus with foolscap stitched (paper) deeds.

My selection interview would hopefully be very different in 2021. Back then, I wrote to about twenty Edinburgh firms selected from the White Book; received a number of requests for interviews; and chose three firms with distinguished sounding names to go and see. Arriving at Brodies WS on my bicycle, I made the classic error of chaining it to the railings outside the senior partner’s room; and discombobulated by his intense gaze, left my bicycle clips on for the interview. However, as I had been at Fettes with the office manager’s son, I got the job later without any further ado. I cycled on to Dundas and Wilson’s office for my next interview; here they asked me questions about the law which flummoxed me. Needless to say, no job offer from them.

My traineeship started in the “Parliament House Department” – which nowadays would be called dispute resolution. My day consisted of cycling up to Parliament House to deal with the mysteries of counsel, the Petitions Department, etc. then cycling back to Rothesay Terrace, perhaps after a quick sunbathe in Princes Street Gardens. Once I had to install a washing machine for one of the partners; as this particular partner was rather intimidating and used to mortify me by coming into the Stockbridge Launderette when I was doing my washing on a Saturday, I was very pleased to ensure the machine was properly plumbed in. It never occurred to me that this may have been outwith my traineeship contract. I then had to go to Parliament House in my oily overalls and was cheered by a crowd awaiting an interdict in an industrial dispute. Goodness knows who they thought I was.

The partners of Brodies at that time generally owned country estates, or certainly aspired to, and the pursuit of the law was very much secondary to country pursuits. It was never a good idea to be ill, as one of the partners would insist you recuperated by staying on his estate and enjoying the fresh air, lack of heating, and hearty blood sports. One generally returned vowing never to be ill again.

It was hard to work out how some partners justified their position. One seemed to spend his day reading National Geographic magazines; his room was always deathly quiet apart from the ticking of his grandfather clock. I never heard his telephone ring. He may not even had had such a vulgar device. In fact there were more grandfather clocks (three) than fax machines (one) in the office.

Another partner never threw away any company reports; there was a winding path to his desk with tottering piles of accounts on either side. The cleaners were forbidden to enter his room. A third partner had started his career as a colonial officer in Nigeria, and could very easily be sidetracked into reminiscing about bride price negotiations deep in the Nigerian bush; this was where he had honed his legal bargaining skills.

When I started in the estate conveyancing department, largely acting for friends and relatives of the landed partners, we were passed any land registration cases that came to the firm; as trainees, we were supposedly expert in these new-fangled matters, and also were supposed to know all about the mysterious Matrimonial Homes Act. I started to realise that at last I was actually learning something useful. I did a lot of work for one partner whose black labrador was expert in shoving his nose into ones crotch while we presented letters for signature. Any mistake in a letter was corrected in red pen, and thrown back (literally) at one with the sobriquet “howler” ringing in our ears. When typing a letter these days I always try to check for “howlers” – forty years on. I do apologise for any “howlers” that have crept into this missive.

One of the roles of the office manager was to enforce the dress code. As a former colonial policeman, who had once arrested Jomo Kenyatta, he was the ideal man for the job. Unpolished shoes were remarked upon; and there was no heatwave too hot to relax the rule about wearing your “coat” (suit jacket) in reception or outside on the street. One young assistant was admonished for arriving one Monday morning in a distinctly dishevelled suit; he proffered the excuse that he had just that morning returned from St Tropez where he had been dumped in David Niven’s swimming pool. This was such a bizarre excuse that it was accepted without demur. Whether true or not – who knows?

One skill that was honed to perfection during my traineeship was that of rubber band pinging. In the room I shared with three others – we still meet up for lunch when we can – rubber bands, expertly targeted, frequently landed with a “plop” in our coffee mugs. If one of us was having an intense conversation on the phone – perhaps with the factor of some Highland estate – we expected rubber bands to be directed at us with some vigour in an attempt to distract us. Once the senior partner walked in during a particularly vigorous exchange of fire, and a rubber band landed on his shoulder. He either ignored it or did not notice it. We never dared to ask him.

After two years the 1981 intake of trainees were handed our discharges, told we were worse than the 1980 apprentices and hardly fit to make the tea, and thus chastised we made our way into the legal world. What we had learned, apart from rubber band expertise and plumbing, was hard to specify; but somehow we all managed to make some sort of a career.