Susan Murray

“I’ve been on the Law Society council since 2017 and for every year I’ve been involved with the Law Society legal aid has been an issue – it’s an issue of chronic underfunding,” she says.

“We have various committees that deal with legal aid and we see this very much as an access to justice issue. I’m always a bit concerned when we use that phrase that not everyone knows what it means, but it’s really important to understand that what we’re having reported back to us is that there’s a real and unmet legal need around Scotland. The term ‘legal aid deserts’ has been coined; the judiciary has commented that there’s a lack of young criminal solicitors appearing before them and they are concerned about that.

“I have no doubt that when I undertake what presidents do every year, which is go round the country to our constituencies, that I’ll receive more reports of issues on the ground with legal aid. I’m going to be trying to bring everything together to evidence the immediate legal need […] What I’m hopeful of is playing my part in a very long-running project to stimulate and continue a discussion between government, the Legal Aid Board, Law Society, bar associations, members, the Crown Office and the judiciary. There are so many different and important parts of Scottish civic society that are involved, but what we’re hoping for is a substantial increase in funding as quickly as possible.”

Fighting the corner of legal aid lawyers is something Murray has in common with her predecessors but, while the vast majority of past presidents were from a private practice background, she is unusual in that almost her entire career has been spent in-house. The first in-houser to hold the role in a decade, Murray had a brief stint in private practice before joining the NHS’s central legal office in 1984. She has been there ever since.

“I went in initially to deal with a building contract dispute that related to the building of a hospital in Ayrshire,” she says. “That involved an arbitration with the contractors, who were wanting more money because they were having to do more work, and a professional negligence litigation in the English courts.”

That case took more than four years to resolve and, when it completed, Murray decided to stay in the NHS but move across to medical negligence.

“That was a different dimension – we were really getting deep into healthcare issues,” she says. “We were supporting where we could the clinicians and nurses who were delivering the services but also acting on behalf of the public – where cases should have been settled they were settled as quickly and fairly as possible.

“I specialised in high-value claims – cerebral palsy, traumatic brain injuries, cases involving babies where the clinicians are quite rightly concerned about claims being made against them and allegations of negligent activities. Those are incredibly complex cases. There are lots of different issues, but causation in particular is a huge issue because sometimes it’s very difficult to know what has caused damage to the brain; a baby can be delivered without any difficulty and still have cerebral palsy; it’s not straightforward and I have enjoyed working with experts in the field like paediatricians, obstetricians, midwives and bringing law into a complex scientific area.”

In addition to her work in the NHS legal department, Murray has twice taken part in major health-related public inquiries. Between 2008 and 2015 she was the legal lead on the Penrose Inquiry, which examined how thousands of patients in Scotland came to be infected with contaminated blood containing hepatitis C and HIV, then from 2018 worked on the Scottish aspects of the wider UK Infected Blood Inquiry. Both required her to give up her day-to-day duties in the NHS legal team.

Now, though she is still working part-time in the NHS legal department, she has taken on a similar role at the Scottish Hospitals Inquiry, which is looking into whether construction faults adversely impacted on patient safety at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital (QEUH) in Glasgow and the Royal Hospital for Children and Young People in Edinburgh.

“I’m now dealing once again, 35 to 37 years later, with engineers, architects, ventilation, water – all the services in those buildings,” Murray says. “That’s ongoing at the moment and is about to start hearings in relation to the QEUH.”

The remit of the inquiry is wide, but at its heart is the question of whether the boards of NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde and NHS Lothian had proper governance processes in place to oversee the building projects. There have been a series of scandals at the £842 million Glasgow super-hospital since it opened in 2015, with a number of patients dying after contracting infections linked to its water system. Problems with the ventilation system at the Edinburgh hospital were discovered days before it was due to open in July 2019, meaning it could not ultimately open until March 2021.

Though the differences are obvious, with the inquiry seeking to provide answers about a huge public service that people right across the country rely upon, the scope of the work Murray is doing in terms of holding government agencies to account bears some similarity to the work the Law Society is doing around legal aid. Yet while everyone is in agreement about the problems facing the health service, Murray believes she has some work to do in making the case about the problems the legal sector is also facing.

“It’s a difficult time to try to improve the levels of funding coming from government for legal aid – I don’t need to tell anyone about that,” she says. “However, what we need to do is get buy-in from everyone that this is a genuine problem.

“My concern is that we reach a point of no return. Criminal law is one of the specialties in law that young people seem to be very keen on – or it would be if it looked as if it would provide a good, sustainable, long-term career. I’ve come across a lot of young lawyers who have gone into criminal private practice and are saying they want to move into the fiscal services or the PDSO [Public Defence Solicitors’ Office] because the pay and conditions are better. Really what we need to do is create a situation where firms, even small firms can keep on their trainees and don’t lose them to those other organisations that work in the same area but are funded entirely differently.

“There are complexities, there’s no doubt, about funding private practice because it’s not one size fits all, but we must get to a stage where we have a system that provides a livelihood.”