“I’d been working in a high street firm and, after qualifying as a solicitor advocate, was thinking about going to the bar,” Gray says. “Then I saw an advert for rradar and really liked the look of its business model and ethos. It seemed really fresh and modern and different. I’ve always wanted to find a way of doing what I’m doing that suits me as a person and rradar really appealed to me. I joined in 2019 and I haven’t looked back since.”

Founded by former DLA Piper partner Gary Gallen, the firm, which is headquartered in Hull, is focused on the insurance market. But Gray, who leads its Scottish arm, says the thing that attracted him most is the fact it is very much not a traditional legal practice.

“The firm was founded in 2012 and was one of the first ABS law firms created after the Legal Services Act was passed in England,” he says. “Gary started his career in a similar way to me, at a high street criminal legal aid practice, then was a Crown prosecutor for a while before he went to DLA Piper and was an equity partner for quite a number of years.

“He was seeing his clients make the same mistakes time and time again. They had insurance policies to kick in when things went wrong but they didn’t seek any follow-up or root-cause analysis and he saw an opportunity to disrupt the market.

“Insurance is very much demand-led – you sell an insurance policy and the client keeps it in case something goes wrong then you pay an excess in relation to your claim and your premiums rise. Gary was seeing that a lot but wasn’t seeing any lessons being learned. He thought there had to be a better way.”

Gallen’s idea, which is replicated on the Scottish side of the business, was to have access to a legal practice – rradar – imbedded in the insurance policies sold to small and medium sized businesses to help them minimise risk and prevent events escalating into claims. Much of rradar’s success has been down to its relationship with Axa, acting as legal services partner for the organisation’s management liability policy.

“It’s of benefit to policyholders,” Gray says, “but also to the insurer because they don’t have to pay out for claims. The whole thing is designed to create greater social value and a fairer economy by disrupting the capitalist model. Gary started it in his conservatory as a one-man band – the ‘rr’ at the start of the name rradar is to serve as a reminder of the risk and reward inherent in the business – and now we have more than 200 employees and there are over 135,000 businesses that have access to our services through our insurance products.”

Despite the firm’s success, it is not the career that Gray envisaged for himself when he was studying law at the University of Glasgow and spending his holidays chauffeuring for celebrities including Chris Martin, Gwyneth Patrow, Robbie Coltrane and Slash. Indeed, after spending time as a snowboard instructor in Canada he came back to Scotland to follow the well-trodden path to qualification, landing a traineeship with Paisely firm McCusker McElroy & Gallanagh.

“They took me on board and threw me in at the deep end, giving me no choice but to swim,” he says. “It was a brilliant place to get a grounding as a lawyer. It was a typical high street, criminal defence, legal aid firm. It was the busiest firm in Paisley and had the lion’s share of the sheriff court there every day – out of 45 cases, we’d have 35.”

It wasn’t just Paisley Sheriff Court that the firm appeared in, with Gray regularly travelling the length and breadth of the country, often at short notice, to represent clients.

“I had one day where I was asked on the Tuesday afternoon to go to Thurso to do an ID parade at 8pm and then to be in court the following morning,” he recalls. “I was half way up the road when I got a call saying there had been a diary change and I’d need to be in the high court in Dunoon the next day. I did the ID parade, got a few hours’ sleep at my mother-in-law’s in Wick then left at 4am to come back down the road. I went to Johnston to get the file, familiarised myself with the papers on the ferry to Dunoon then got to court at 10.15am and went straight into the hearing.”

Gray describes his time at McCusker McElroy & Gallanagh as like going through altitude training, where “you have to communicate with some of the most disadvantaged people in society, take those instructions and try to convince some of the most powerful people in society of their case”.

“It gives you the most unbelievable training in litigation,” he says. “It’s a such a high volume and such a high pace, but the more you do it the more you build the ability to think on your feet.”

Yet, while Gray says doing such work gave him a solid grounding in the law, he acknowledges that the picture has changed even in the decade or so since he was cutting his teeth. Things now are “bleak”, he says, with the “chronic underfunding” of legal aid having an impact.

“Politicians don’t seem to be willing to make the right moves or to look at the long-term bigger picture of how important a well-funded defence bar is for a democratic society,” he says. “I’ve got so much respect for the people doing that work and fighting with the authorities day in and day out for recognition.”

Having decided to leave that world behind, Gray does a variety of advocacy and management at rradar, acting on some of the larger cases that do end up in court and helping grow the Scottish team from four to eight solicitors since he joined. The aim is to “significantly increase” that number in the next two years while continuing to develop the services the firms offers as well as how it offers them.

“Gary Gallen has been really good to me in terms of putting me in a position of responsibility at a relatively young age,” Gray says. “He’s put his faith in me and given me a lot of autonomy, and that gets a lot out of me.

“This firm is so different to what I imagine it would be like to work in most commercial law firms. I came in the door here and was given the opportunity to do so many more things than just being a lawyer. I do business development, product development, and we’re constantly trying to build the business and improve our services and the customer journey. You never feel like you’re treading water in a business like this.

“I came from the legal aid world, where there was an incredible number of cases and every day felt like a fight for survival. Now every day feels very exciting. It’s not so much what we’ve achieved so far but what we’re going to achieve that gets me out of bed in the morning and keeps me interested.”