A happy ending to ABS – or are they a bogeyman service?

If a haulage firm can move into legal work, change is already here – and the Scottish profession must be ready for action, Austin Lafferty tells David Lee

THE bogeyman is “an amorphous imaginary being used by adults to frighten children into compliant behaviour”. At times, alternative business structures (ABS) feels a bit like the bogeyman of the legal world – constantly held up as a reason to comply and modernise, but shadowy and uncertain, and possibly not real at all.

However, like the “boogieman” in US horror films, ABS is definitely coming – and there will be casualties along the way, though perhaps less blood.

“I think it will take five years for the legal landscape to change in England and we will be well behind that,” says Austin Lafferty, who this week becomes the Law Society of Scotland’s new president – another kind of bogeyman, perhaps?

“Lots of firms are finding it harder than before but they are not seeing the tidal wave on the horizon. There is no visibility of how things are going to change.”

It is a different world, says Lafferty: “You have Eddie Stobart offering barrister services, which in some ways is a novelty – but if a haulage firm offers legal services, it won’t take long for many other firms and organisations to enter the legal market, maybe not as general practitioners, but offering executry work or conveyancing.

“That will slowly but surely erode high-street general practice and private client work, and it will probably happen osmotically; it starts with a long-standing client not coming to you when they move house, then after six months you have lost maybe 200 clients, and your turnover is two-thirds of what it was. If I am right, the time to reorganise is now.”

Lafferty is happy with the performance of his own small firm: “We are very busy, but we keep an eye on the pennies and run a tight ship. We work hard – and know we have to work hard. We have very good IT systems and we are good at knowing what we are good at. We turn away work that we are not good at and pass it to other solicitors.”

Last year, Lafferty insisted he could combine his legal and media work with the vice-president’s role – and says he has done so, and will continue to do so as president: “I have managed it – I always carry my laptop, my colleagues cover work for me if necessary and I have always been prepared to do what is needed. I know this is not a 9-5 job, then on to the golf course. Clients might e-mail you at 10pm and expect an answer – that’s the way it is.”

Legal aid is one big issue that might keep President Lafferty up at night – and he is very concerned about how the economics stack up.

“For many years, I strutted the boards at Glasgow Sheriff Court and other such places,” he says. “If we do not have a healthy legal aid system, access to justice will collapse. We do not ask people to pay for basic medical or educational services and I do not see what the difference is.

“I have a very simple view – if we make it uneconomical, solicitors will stop providing legal aid, clients will not get representation and justice will crumble. Surely, we are a better society than that. I will be engaging with Scottish Legal Aid Board (Slab) and with politicians on this – if necessary, every day. I am all for efficiency and economy and cutting out waste in the system so the money can be put to other uses – but that is not what the cuts are resulting in.

“They are making it hard for lawyers to earn a reasonable living and it is not even a level playing field. The government are paymasters but the lawyers are self-employed and do not have any pensions, security of employment or human resources protection.”

Lafferty knows this is a hard public sell, and links it to one of three key objectives in his year of office: “My first is not to make an arse of things, the second is to coax a dispirited profession back closer to one other, and the third is to try to enhance the image of the profession with the public and stakeholders. I want to reach a point where we understand the full potential of the Scottish solicitor profession because I do not think we have come anywhere near that and it’s what we need to know now in terms of ABS and the drift to London.”

Lawyers are, he says, by nature fearful: “Fear or caution arises out of the fact that we are trained to think of ourselves as professionals first and businesspeople second – we need to think of ourselves equally as businesspeople and solicitors. Some say, ‘Of course I have run a firm for 30 years so I know how to be a businessman or woman’, but their terms of reference are far too limited.”

So the message is clear – change now or the bogeyman might get you.