The life and times of a lawyer to be

Published on Monday 4 August 2008 10:59

JOHN Geddes, a graduate of the University of Aberdeen, is a trainee at Raeburn Christie Clark and Wallace. This is his blog about life as a trainee solicitor in Scotland...

December 10, 1600 hrs

I'll start where I left off last time and would like to take this opportunity to clear my name. One of my friends, doing his traineeship somewhere in the Aberdeenshire countryside, attended the ARTL road-show in Aberdeen at which reference was made to this very blog. Rumour has it that all I do with my day is lick envelopes bound for Registers of Scotland. Never a more fallacious statement has been uttered. I've been busy buying, selling, transferring, re-mortgaging and discharging (standard securities for the avoidance of doubt!) for the last two months!

Although there is good news; I hear that the kind chaps at "The Registers" are considering changing their envelopes to self-seal. I'd like to think that my words carry great weight and they have taken heed of my grievance, although I doubt that very much.

I made another school boy error yesterday morning, again involving my good friends at "The Registers". In my early morning state of semi-consciousness I attempted to fax a Copy Deed request only to accidentally punch in the phone number instead of the fax number. School boy error I know. I then got the fright of my life (and a sudden wake up call) as the fax machine wished me a "good morning" and asked how it could help me. I wasn't aware these contraptions had speakers; I thought they still ran on steam!

Last week I experienced my first holiday as a trainee (which is why you have had to wait a bit later for this instalment) and had an eerie premonition of what to expect as a fully fledged solicitor. I stayed back well after I should have been away in order that all my settlements were up to date and on my return I was greeted by a mountain of memos and letters to attend to urgently. In addition I had forgotten (and even if I had remembered I wouldn't have known how) to set up my out of office message on my email and phone. This meant that I had heaps of messages from people at the branches asking me to arrange things for them in Aberdeen. They must have been thinking that this new trainee was a bit rude. Oops.

Further lessons learned from the School of Hard Laws this fortnight include – your client will change their instructions at some stage and expect you to know this without actually telling you; SAF's, Forms 1, 2 & 4 get much easier to fill out after a few weeks but will still take aaaaages to do and finally legal offices still use type-writers and secretaries find it entertaining when male trainees use them. I feel a discrimination claim coming ….

Finally a quick shout out to Raeburn Christie Clark & Wallace's departing Marketing Co-ordinator, Emma Lawson who was heavily involved in the planning and running of this blog. Your help was greatly appreciated.