Lawyer Of The Month

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

When Gilson Gray LLP appointed David Winnie to lead its sports offering in May this year, he arrived with a distinct advantage. Heading up the firm’s new sports and immigration specialism and working alongside its corporate team, Mr Winnie is not only a solicitor with 15 years’ experienc

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 &

It could be tempting after two decades of establishing a successful reputation in a particular sector of the law to continue to plough the same furrow and enjoy the degree of regularity that brings. Not so for Neil Hay who pivoted, as he puts it, from 20 years working in legal aid defence toward a n

Plug and Play. It’s a catchy little phrase when it comes to running a law firm, but Brian Inkster isn’t overly concerned with preserving tradition and the approach he has developed over the past 25 years has seen Inksters Solicitors grow from a practice primarily specialising in crofting

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

The first in her extended family to go to university, intellectual property specialist Lesley Larg was appointed as Dundee-based solicitors Thorntons' first female managing partner in 2021, taking over from Craig Nicol who held the post for 10 years, seven of those years as joint managing partn

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

At a cursory glance, the minimum legal requirements for producing Scotch Whisky appear to be deceptively simple. The spirit can only be made in Scotland from just three natural ingredients – water, yeast and cereals – and must be matured in oak casks for a minimum of three year

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

Laura Cameron’s dream of becoming a dentist when growing up in Perth was thwarted by an unfortunate and insuperable drawback: her aversion to the sight of blood. “Although I studied sciences at school and got the grades, after a few dissections in the biology lab I realised fairly early