Having studied history and English and then law at the University of Glasgow, Forrester began his career with Maclay Murray & Spens in the mid-1960s with the original intention of going straight to the bar after two years in private practice. A soujourn in America meant he didn’t call in Edinburgh until 1972, though, and after an extended shift that saw him set up his own firm in Brussels and serve as the UK’s last-ever judge on the European General Court, it took a full 50 years before he actually started practising at the Scottish bar.

It has, he says, been quite a journey.

“University was a very pleasant experience then I worked at Maclay Murray & Spens for the late Thomas Risk [who went on to become governor of Bank of Scotland and was later knighted] and Ian Inglis,” he recalls. “I collected debts, worked on shipping accidents, personal injury, violation of tortious acts, that kind of thing.

“Tradition was that you’d do a year in Glasgow then a year in Edinburgh, working with another firm before going to the bar. After Glasgow I went to Edinburgh to meet with a distinguished silver-haired gentleman and at the end of our conversation he said ‘fine, join us in September and you can be here for a year and then go to the bar’. He said ‘I think that’s everything’ to which I whispered ‘salary?’ and he said ‘salary? I do honour your frankness and courage in asking that question because normally we give our young men something to purchase books with when they leave us’.

“I went back to Glasgow and found I’d had a letter from Tulane University in New Orleans. They said ‘we’ll offer you a place and $2,000’ so I went and did a masters in civil law and wrote my thesis on trade secrets.”

When he completed his course in 1969 Forrester says he “went and knocked on a few doors” in New York. Nelson Adams, who was at that time one year away from being elected managing partner of renowned white shoe firm Davis Polk & Wardwell, not only offered him a job as a litigator but a salary of $15,000 too. “That was more than a British cabinet minister got in those days,” Forrester says.

“I found New York and working there just fascinating,” he says. “There were lots of us young energetic – mainly male at that time – lawyers and we’d be there regularly until nine or ten at night and I’d go in for half a day over the weekend. It was really good fun.”

Forrester says that one of the most memorable cases he worked on during his time there involved a Pan Am airplane that was hijacked by Palestinian guerrillas, flown from Amsterdam to London then on to Beirut and ultimately blown up in Cairo.

“It was a dispute between two insurance companies, with the question being whether it was an act of war or the result of a risk like theft, and I had the absurd luck of spending months in Beirut, Damascus and Istanbul looking for witnesses,” he says. “Eventually it was found that the destruction of the plane did not fall into the war-risk exclusion so the American insurers had to compensate Pan Am of the loss if the plane.”

After a couple of years with Davis Polk, and being unable to call to the New York bar due to his ‘alien’ status in the US, Forrester decided to return to Scotland to devil with David Edward at the beginning of the 1970s. The bar had been in his sights since his days at Glasgow University Union, when he debated the likes of Donald Dewar, John Smith, Colin MacKay and James Douglas-Hamilton, and, with New York out of the question, his father – at that time headmaster of Kelvinside Academy – told him he “better get called somewhere”.

Yet despite calling to the Scottish bar in 1972, Forrester didn’t stick around, instead heading to Brussels to work for another top-tier law firm: Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton. There he did “customs law, chemicals and lots and lots of competition”, before setting up Forrester & Norall with his friend Chris Norall in 1981. That firm was ultimately bought over by White & Case in 1997 and, having moved across as part of the deal, during his time there Forrester set up a pro bono practice, something he says he’d learned the importance of while at Davis Polk. Working on an ultimately successful murder appeal that came his way only after a court clerk spotted irregularities with the way a confession had been extracted taught him, he says, that for a huge number of people access to justice is “theoretical but in reality extremely limited”.

“That’s why, in my later life, one of the things I’m most proud of is that when I was at White & Case they asked me to set up a pro-bono programme for the firm worldwide,” he says. “That involved picking cases because you can’t do everything. You’ve got to be realistic, you’ve got to get people on board and they have to enjoy what they’re doing otherwise they won’t do it. Pro bono doesn’t make money – you can’t live on your earnings from pro bono – but it enhances your reputation and if you have a good pro bono programme you should trumpet it so young lawyers know the kind of cases you have done.”

One case White & Case handled during Forrester’s time there was a challenge to the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy employed by the US military. The regulation was ostensibly put in place to allow gay people to serve but in practice only served to prolong the discrimination they had always been subjected to.

“Hitherto it had been a crime to be gay in the military but under President Bill Clinton they introduced ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,” Forrester explains. “Don’t ask, don’t tell wasn’t what really happened. There was an Air Force colonel who had been rotated back to Air Force college and, when he left, he left his computer to his successor. There were some personal emails on that and from those it emerged he had a relationship with a man and he was told to resign. He went to court along with a group of other members of the military who’d had similar experiences and we were successful in the district court of California [arguing that the policy was unlawful]. Before it could be argued before the Supreme Court President Obama repealed the contentious regulation. That was a change in the law that made life a bit easier for individuals.”

Which almost takes us to the point at which Forrester decided he should come and practise at the bar he was called to in 1972. But, while he has been practising in Scotland since 2021, before he did that he had a six-year spell as a judge in Luxembourg, overseeing around 200 cases to do with everything from competition and access to documents to plant varieties, public procurement and employment.

“In 2015 the Brits decided to nominate me to the General Court of the European Union and I was sworn in that year,” he says. “That was wildly, wildly different to my previous career – it was 28 countries and 24 languages with one working language; there were no dissents, only unanimous decisions. I had been an arbitrator before but never a judge and certainly not in an international court. It was a very privileged life.

“That ended with Brexit [Forrester’s tenure came to an end when the transition period ended at the start of 2021] then immediately came Covid. At the end of that I thought I didn’t want to hang up my wig, that I’d rather keep active, and the Scottish bar very kindly made me very welcome.”

Although the UK is no longer part of the EU, the influence of the European courts is likely to be felt in all UK legal jurisdictions for many years to come and, having finally made it back to Scotland, where he is a member of Ampersand Advocates, Forrester has been kept busy writing opinions in all his areas of expertise. And, while it took him a long time to get there, he says he couldn’t be happier to spending this part of his career in Scotland.

“The Scottish bar is very collegiate and extremely friendly – it’s very, very impressive,” he says. “The contribution the bar makes to the welfare of Scotland as a distinct entity is very impressive. It’s not like a lot of my previous experiences of practising law.”