From the President's Desk: The power of kindness, dignity and respect

There’s no doubt we’re living in challenging times, and the temptation to sit at home and immerse ourselves in Netflix and Love Island while hoping it will all just go away is more than understandable.

On top of the stresses and demands of our personal lives, the world is facing two high profile and terrible conflicts, raging forest fires and devastating floods that appear to have been caused by climate change, and threats and attacks on lawyers and judges from state and non-state actors in civilised and democratic countries.

Sometimes the personal and the external coincide, as they did with Covid-19. The pandemic was a shock to us all but I think in the longer term it has had a greater impact on young people, including recently qualified solicitors. When my fellow Law Society Council member Arlene Gibb and I met with newly qualified solicitors in Aberdeen the other day, it struck us that many of them had studied for their law degrees and/or their Diploma at home during Covid, completed their traineeships at home and are now spending a lot of their working days working from home as well. We asked them about networking and, while they valued coming into the office and getting support from those around them, they didn’t feel that there was much appetite amongst their peers for socialising too much outside of the workday.

I hope that gap in networking and relationship building will be filled in time. Our CEO Ben and I have plenty of opportunity for networking in our roles and find it so valuable for our work. We recently attended the opening of the legal year in London, where we heard chilling stories from the presidents of the American Bar Association, the Istanbul Bar Association, the Law Society of Zimbabwe and the Law Association for Asia and the Pacific. It was only a year ago we were raising our own concerns at Scottish Government plans to impose direct political control over the legal professions. Criticism from the international legal community, the judiciary and others helped is having this concerning proposal for the rule of law dropped. I have to say that the threats those four leaders described in their jurisdictions are far greater than any challenge we have faced.

So, what can we do? Is there room for optimism? The amazing speakers at our recent Annual Conference gave me even more reason to think so with their confidence for the future and the constructive solutions they propose. Determination to constructively and carefully pursue the potential of AI and other technologies for example seems an essential step to enable us to continue thriving as solicitors.

I was particularly impressed by the speakers who joined our panel discussion on the rule of law. The message was clear from two Americans – American Bar Association President Michelle Behnke and Stephen Richman from the International Bar Association – and from Professor Tom Mullen from the University of Glasgow. We as lawyers should be ambassadors for our profession and for our communities and call out any threat to the independence of our judiciary and of our legal system more generally.

Guy Beringer, one of our two keynote speakers and a former Senior Partner at Allen & Overy, argued persuasively that the barriers to entry and benefits of membership of our profession are tenable only if we maintain ethical standards and a commitment to public good. Trust in our profession is paramount and maintaining that trust has to be a collective responsibility, not borne just by big firms or professional bodies.

And the icing on the conference cake in my view was the closing keynote speech from Judge Victoria Pratt about the importance of kindness, dignity and respect. Despite being a former judge in New Jersey in the US, she radiates positivity and was determined as a judge to care for all those appearing in her court room, achieving positive outcomes simply by asking the right questions and listening to the answers.

So, I think there’s no harm in escaping from time to time into the world of Netflix and Love Island. But we need to pay attention also to what is happening in our communities and more broadly, and to work together in resolving issues. As long as we respect each other and speak out against what we feel is wrong, I think we will be OK.