Ian Moir

Having been told while a pupil at the High School of Glasgow that his choices were law, accountancy or medicine, the young Moir decided that accountants were boring and that his father was so successful as a doctor – more of which later – that he’d better give medicine a miss. Law was the winner by default.

But, while he completed his law degree and diploma at the University of Glasgow, he was so focused on his part-time job as a security guard for G4S – and the access it gave him to golf tournaments, including the Open Championship – that he didn’t get round to applying for a training contract until it was almost too late.

He may be known now as the face of the criminal side of the profession, but the result of his tardiness was that he became a criminal practitioner purely by default.

“I was knocking about the West End of Glasgow in late September, early October after finishing my diploma and I bumped into someone from my course who asked me where I was doing my traineeship,” Moir recalls. “I said I hadn’t started looking and they said ‘there are none left, they’re all gone’.

“I went up to the university and there was one advert for a traineeship at Knox & Co in Cranhill. I applied for it and got it.

“That’s how I got into criminal law. I thought I was a man of the world, but I wasn’t. I had a sword pulled on me and everything. Looking back, I don’t know how I stuck it.”

But stick it he did and, with one of the firm’s assistants resigning during Moir’s first week of work, he was quickly thrown in at the deep end. “I was given the keys to another office and told to get on with it,” he recalls. “It was very much sink or swim.”

From asking a lawyer in another firm to teach him how to fill out legal aid forms to visiting clients in HMP Barlinnie’s notorious Wendy House, Moir soon found his feet and, on completing his traineeship, joined Kinloch & Co in Glasgow’s Possilpark. Following a stint as a partner at Hamilton Burns, he left to set up Ian Moir & Co in 2009.

“I had two young kids and it was time for a change,” he says. “Initially I worked seven days a week, 12 to 16 hours a day and I did everything myself. I had no secretaries or anything like that and I was driving to places like Inverness and Wick to attend court.

“It gradually grew and, after working from the house for 18 months, I eventually got an office in Carlton Place. I had a trainee and a secretary then Paul [Sweeney] joined 10-and-a-half years ago. He became a partner then an equity partner and we changed the name to Moir & Sweeney in 2019. I couldn’t do what I do now without Paul.”

Since setting up the firm Moir, whose main focus remained criminal work, became convener of the Law Society’s criminal legal aid committee, a role he has found both rewarding and, increasingly, frustrating. Trying to find agreement on the level of fees lawyers should be paid for carrying out publicly funded work has been the main bone of contention.

“After the Evans legal aid review reported in 2018 a payment advisory panel was set up by the Scottish government and I was part of that,” Moir says. “It eventually reported after Covid but all we’ve heard is that we need an evidence base [for setting fee levels]. No matter what we produce they say we need another evidence base.

“Another group was set up after that to establish a fee review mechanism in the hope that once we had rates at the right level there would be a mechanism for them to go up every year and we could get on with improving the system in our discussions with government rather than fighting over money.

“We gave lots of examples to the government on how fees could rise, for example by RPI inflation, but it took forever to not even get to the first base of instructing a company to gather the evidence needed. They tried to put it out to tender three times but didn’t get anywhere.

“Then they said even if they did get a company there’s no money anyway so you probably wouldn’t get a rise. At that point [April this year] the Law Society withdrew from the talks. We don’t see any realistic possibility of the government delivering. It’s very disappointing.”

From his own firm’s point of view the never-ending saga over fee levels has drastically changed the type of work it does, with the firm gradually moving away from legal aid work to focus on other things.

“We have made a conscious effort to target more private work because you just can’t make a decent living purely on legal aid,” Moir says. “We’ve tried hard to get ourselves into a position where we have credibility for doing health and safety cases, we act for FTSE 100 companies on matters like keeping their licence from the traffic commissioner, and we were on the panel for the 2014 Commonwealth Games – we did the only trial that came out of that. We didn’t get paid for that but it was really high-profile work. We’re going to see about doing it again [for the 2026 Glasgow games].”

Many firms across the sector have followed suit and, with individual lawyers leaving a profession they now feel to be stressful and thankless, the number of firms giving up on legal aid work is also rising.

Figures obtained by the Scottish Liberal Democrats in 2022 showed that the number of firms signed up to the Scottish Legal Aid Board’s duty solicitor scheme fell from 392 to 352 between 2019 and 2021 while solicitor numbers fell from 753 to 643. Further research from the Law Society, also published in 2022, showed that the 139 most-deprived communities in Scotland shared just 29 civil legal aid firms between them. In access to justice terms, Moir says, the impact is devastating.

“It’s really disheartening that the Scottish government doesn’t seem to listen to the fact that lawyers with many years of experience are all heading for retirement age and wanting out because it’s getting more and more stressful,” he says.

“There aren’t enough of us to do the job and who is going to train young people that come through? The trainee fund [in 2021 the government provided a £1m fund to pay for 40 legal aid traineeships] should have been the start of fixing the problem, and we [Moir & Sweeney] were able to have two trainees that year, one on funding and one not, but it needed to be done every year. They only did it once and have refused to find the money to do it again.

“Those trainees that were funded have all qualified but they’ve not all stayed. They can get better-paid jobs in the fiscal’s office or the government without antisocial hours. Everything we’ve warned about for years has happened now.

“There are young lawyers leaving, very experienced lawyers leaving, people in the middle getting totally fed up with it. They’re unable to put up with the relentless nature of trying to keep the courts going when there aren’t enough of us.

“Every time there’s a change made it’s to suit somebody else and it makes our lives more difficult. The GeoAmey [prisoner transport] contract, for example, is a shambles and it impacts on us because during all the time we spend waiting for clients to arrive at court we aren’t getting paid.”

Despite it all, Moir loves the job. “I’ve never found anything I’d rather do” – and will continue to make the case for criminal legal aid work to be properly funded, something he believes is as vital to a functioning society as education and health services. It is the influence of the father whose success as a doctor put the young Moir off a career in medicine that drives him on.

“My dad, Donald Moir, was the first person in the family to go to university,” he says. “He did medicine at Glasgow then did his national service in the Army Medical Corp. When he finished that he went to America for two years and worked in a hospital in Cleveland, Ohio that had a maternity unit as well as a unit that was treating burns victims from Pearl Harbor.

“The burn victims were in so much pain they would shout and swear and upset the women coming in to give birth. They were in so much pain my dad decided he’d try to come up with something to help and he developed the epidural. It was so effective as pain relief it was developed for pregnant women giving birth too.

“When he came back to the UK he brought it to the maternity ward at Yorkhill Hospital, where he was an anaesthetist. He wrote books on it and went all over the world telling people how to do it. He was very modest about and didn’t really talk about it.

“I knew he’d invented the epidural but I didn’t realise how significant that was until someone at his funeral said that about two million a day are administered worldwide. He died seven years ago and he never got as much recognition as he should have done but that’s in part because he didn’t seek it.”

The recognition Moir senior did get included being awarded the Obstetric Anaesthetists’ Association’s gold medal, which is awarded to individuals who, the association says, have made “an exceptional contribution to obstetric anaesthesia and analgesia”, in 1988. He also caught the eye of the sister in charge of the Yorkhill maternity ward – Moir’s mother, Heather – who went on to become his wife.

And while his father could have had a much more lucrative career working and promoting the epidural in America, Moir says the fact he chose to develop his expertise within the Scottish NHS reminds him every day why he needs to continue the fight for legal aid.

“My dad gave his time to the NHS when he could have made a fortune in America and that motivates me to defend the legal aid system,” he says.