Margaret Taylor

Along with Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain and Advocate General Catherine Smith, Solicitor General Ruth Charteris is blazing a trail for women at the very top of the Scottish legal profession, but, with no role model for her to look up to during her school days in Cumbernauld, she very nearly didn’

When he describes his arrival at the Scottish bar as being “a bit convoluted”, Ian Forrester KC really isn’t kidding. 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 or

Scots lawyers have long made the case for overhauling the legal aid system but, with the Scottish government agreeing only a small number of fee uplifts since it commissioned a review of the sector close to a decade ago, many have come to believe that their pleas are destined to fall on deaf ears. W

When it came to finding career inspiration, Scottish Solicitors Bar Association (SSBA) president Simon Brown didn’t have to look much further than his own front room. Though, when he was a child growing up in Irvine, his mum Louise was a teacher and dad Matthew an engineer, by the time Brown w

Jen Ang is a firm believer that equality should be at the heart of the law and that, equally, the law should uphold those equalities. That isn’t always the case, though – which is why Ang co-founded social justice legal organisation Just Right Scotland in 2017. Just Right has proved more

Growing up, Nina Taylor had no thoughts about becoming a lawyer. The first in her family to go to university, she’d started life above the Rainbow Café in Coatbridge, which was run by her Italian father’s family, and wanted to become a journalist. Having just taken up the chairman

Rebecca Samaras never planned to be a lawyer. Having grown up in Ramsgate and then Liverpool, it was history and archaeology that was her passion – Alexander the Great was her hero and as a youngster she was determined that she was going to find his tomb. But, having found herself a single mot

It is just over three months since the merger between Morton Fraser and MacRoberts completed and the enlarged firm’s chief executive Chris Harte is pretty pleased with how things are going. Practice groups are getting to grips with their new capabilities and staff at Morton Fraser MacRoberts &

When Daria Shapovalova arrived in Aberdeen to study for a PhD in international law she never imagined that a decade later she would still be there, lecturing at the University of Aberdeen and leading the institution’s Centre for Energy Law. Her initial encounter with the city had been inauspic

When he was named the Law Society of Scotland’s In-house Rising Star of 2023, Too Good To Go global legal counsel Christopher Knudsen said the achievement was down to the help he had received from others and that he would equally like to “help others in the legal profession in the same w

In 2019, Gillian Treasurer was on the cusp of moving from Wales to take up the coveted role of Scottish Rugby Union’s legal head when she got news that turned her world upside down. “For about a year I’d been feeling absolutely exhausted and quite ill and the day before I left Wale

Sheila Webster is in chipper mood when we catch up on Teams. Though she recently broke her shoulder tripping over a desk in the office, she has just had her sling removed and, while she is still in some pain and reliant on her husband – Themis Advocates KC Andrew Webster – for lifts, she

After two decades running the IP practice at Burness Paull, Colin Hulme is well practised in defending his clients’ intellectual property rights. That does not mean there is nothing left for him to learn, though, which is why he has begun trialling a new form of rights-enforcement exercise: a

When Nicola Rylatt lost her husband Chris to suicide in 2017 it made her reassess her work priorities. The couple had been married for a year and, having begun her career as an asylum and immigration lawyer before moving to Swiss-based NGO Shelter Centre, Ms Rylatt was working in the Geneva office o

When Sally-Anne Anderson made a comeback at Aberdein Considine in 2016 it was to take up partnership after three years as an associate at Harper Macleod. Having worked at the Aberdeen-headquartered business earlier in her career, the employment specialist decided to return as the time felt right to