John Sturrock KC

This week marks the retirement of Scotland’s two most senior judges, Lord Carloway, the Lord President, and Lady Dorrian, the Lord Justice Clerk. Others will pay tribute in their own way and will, I am sure, express views on their contributions to the judiciary, judicial thinking and leadership of the legal profession over the past decade or so. I would like to note their significant contributions to a very important development which goes back 30 years, namely the introduction of advocacy skills training for devils and members in the Faculty of Advocates. This marked a real change in the way advocates approached entry to that branch of the profession.

I have mentioned in this column in the past the enormous contribution made by Mike Jones QC, who became Lord Jones and who sadly died prematurely in 2016. He was one of three leading QCs in the mid-90s who helped give authority to the project. One of the other two was Alan Turnbull QC, now Lord Turnbull, who chairs the Omagh Bombing Inquiry in Northern Ireland and was one of the lead prosecutors in the Lockerbie Trial (recently the subject of a Sky Atlantic docu-drama).

The other was Leeona Dorrian QC, as she then was, who enthusiastically embraced the idea of learning from others (primarily the United States and Australia) and played a key role in modifying the techniques for use in Scotland. Indeed, Lady Dorrian re-wrote the foundational case study for practising advocacy in a criminal trial, which was renamed PF v MacBier, a case about the illegal sale of a bottle of Buckfast from a corner shop.

I was a mere junior counsel appointed as the Faculty’s first director of training and education in 1994, charged with setting up a full programme of training for the Scottish bar. The role played by Lady Dorrian, as a much-respected practitioner, was central to its success. She, Mike Jones and I would regularly travel to North America to participate as members of the training faculty in courses run by the National Institute for Trial Advocacy. Another prominent contributor in those days was Paul Cullen QC, Lord Pentland, who today takes over from Lord Carloway as lord president.

No less than three chairs of current Scottish public inquiries were at one time prominent in that group of leading counsel who formed the first team of advocacy instructors in the Faculty: Lords Brodie and Bracadale and Lady Smith. Current Dean of the Faculty, Roddy Dunlop KC, was a member of one of the early cohorts of devils participating in what became known as the Foundation Course, along with a number of others who now grace the Court of Session bench.

Lord Carloway, then Colin Sutherland QC, played a different but equally important role in the Faculty’s training programme. In the mid-1990s, he was treasurer of the Faculty and, as such, had the foresight to make available the funds that enabled me to give up practice and devote my time to developing the programme and also secured the provision of the necessary physical resources, including the refurbishment of the Mackenzie Building on the High Street. That building became the focal point for the training programme for the devils, and in particular the venue in which the five-week Foundation Course took place.

On the occasion of the passing of the baton by Scotland’s two senior judges, it is good to record their important role in this part of the Scottish bar’s story.

John Sturrock KC is founder of Core Solutions and was director of training and education at the Faculty of Advocates, 1994-2002. This article first appeared in The Scotsman.