In the spotlight: Sounds from the Cotton club

STEVE Cotton is a lawyer with a hinterland. This doesn’t mean he has long-ago indiscretions in his closet. What it does mean is that there is much more to his life than law.

Cotton, a founding member (partner) in CCW Business Lawyers, is also chairman of the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh and is about as arty as solicitors get. But his artistic pursuits do not sit entirely separately from his legal career, and he has firm ideas about how lawyers can learn from the creative industries.

“As lawyers, we focus on detail – which is not always a bad thing,” he says. “But our whole training tends to get reduced to detail and there is a danger that the devil really is in the detail, in a bad way – because you are distracted from the bigger picture. Lawyers are very guilty of wanting to show how clever they are, rather than listening to clients. You should ask ‘What do they want to do and am I doing anything to obstruct that?

“In the arts, you have got to get to that first night. It has to be good first time; if not, audiences don’t come and you lose your funding. That leads to a tremendous community of interest. Everyone is driven to the same goal and there is a tremendous sharing. There are tough cookies protecting their turf, but a real ‘shoulders to the wheel’ approach about getting things done. This has helped me see the bigger picture and get away from the tunnel vision lawyers can exhibit.”

Cotton does not just write the script here – he acts it out, too: “If we are involved in a significant transaction, a few days from a critical deadline we get a colleague who is not involved at all to cast an eye over it.

“They are way out of their comfort zone but it can lead to some great suggestions – again, it’s about the bigger picture. I’m a great believer that there is no such thing as a stupid question, only stupid answers.”

CCW, which was born after a breakaway from Pagan Osborne in 2003 following artistic differences over the direction of the firm, is a small company with a big address: 40 Charlotte Square. Over the years, says Cotton, the phrase ‘Broad Church for Mavericks’ has become applied to CCW – and not in a bad way, he hopes.

“Some individuals do not prosper in what I would call traditional legal firms but are fascinating people,” he says.

“We wanted a firm where we could celebrate difference but share common values and benefits from a whole range of different thinkers. As a firm, we don’t chase every last penny or have a long hours culture to show how macho we are.

“We celebrate the fact that there are so many women in the law and we celebrate pregnancy, and a birth is a new addition to the CCW family. Everyone on the firm works as a team to cover those on maternity leave and we have had a great return from our working mothers in terms of loyalty as a result. If someone coming back wants to do part of her work from 8:30pm to midnight, that’s fine. Everyone has remote access to work, which is common now but wasn’t in 2003. We don’t just talk flexible working, we actually live it.”

Cotton doesn’t socialise with other lawyers much and restates his belief that they are too keen to show how clever they are: “You hear all these trite phrases like ‘client-focused’ and of course we should be, but I would say the people I admire are more about coming up with solutions – and leading. The textbook route should be known, but it’s also about blending a bit of wisdom and creativity to get the clients where they want to be as quickly and economically as you can.”

Cotton is also critical of the “Octopus syndrome” in the law, where solicitors do not offer definitive advice but go around the houses and give a whole range of options.

“If we have been privileged to go to university and be taught the law, we should not say to clients – often in technical terms – here is a range of options and you tell me which one to go with,” he says. “I think we should do more than that. We should think, ‘If this was my money, my business and my problem, what would I do?’ ”

Asked who else in the law he admires, Cotton names Dickson Minto, fellow residents on Charlotte Square (“a place to get solid advice”).

He says DM “cut to the chase and get the deal done” and when he leaves the office on winter nights, the number of lights on in Dickson Minto’s office as its staff work on deals are one of his economic bellwethers.

In the wider Scottish legal sector, Cotton fears for the “race to the bottom”.

He explains: “Too many firms say they will do everything and charge lower and lower fees. Much of what they offer is commodity advice and there will come a day when you can get most of it from the internet from organisations you need never meet. We are in cloud cuckoo land if we think we can compete in such areas with organisations like the Co-Op if we have no working capital.

“The key for me is giving ‘Factor X’ advice and not getting sucked into everything. Identify where you can make a difference for a client with an unexpected idea or suggestion, and glean wisdom from the mistakes of the past.”

One mistake Cotton would like to rectify is the traditional partnership model: “With that model, you pay tax on every penny of profit, and this has stopped firms from re-investing in their businesses.

“Why on earth would any legal firm now not be an LLP? Why would you accept unlimited liability that might stay with you until some years after retirement – for the simple price of lodging accounts with Companies House? The traditional partnership model is just not a modern business animal; sometimes it seems to be a way of keeping the youngsters down.”

Cotton’s egalitarian views are also opposed to the “keep what you kill” mentality that he believes pervades too many legal firms. “There are all sorts of problems from encouraging a lawyer to take on work they shouldn’t keep on to get their team’s income up. We are encouraging the opposite of sharing,” he says. “In the arts, people do share – and some of the best lines in the best plays have come from the guy who happens to be wiring up the lights while the creative team works on the script. And in a small firm like ours, some old-fashioned notions of sharing can be applied – like ‘Do I know and trust my partners?’ ”

Cotton doesn’t trust the Law Society of Scotland and thinks, unlike its incoming president Austin Lafferty, that it cannot sustain its regulatory and representative roles.

“How many lawyers would find it a good idea that the sector they were advising had two regulators dealing with complaints – and the members paid for both? That’s where we are,” he adds.

“The Law Society is an anachronism; there is a fundamental conflict of being a trade union for us and acting in the public interest. If I were in another industry, I would have an independent regulator. What is different about law? Our professional body has this conflict buried at its heart.”

STEVE COTTON’S love of the arts is partly played out in a separate company called CCW Long Play, which he founded with former music A&R (artists and repertoire) man Ronnie Gurr – and Midge Ure of Ultravox.

Cotton describes when he first met Gurr: “We both concluded that artists get a raw deal. At the start of their career, when they most need sound professional advice, they do not get it. Those who do make it can spend quite a lot of their professional career trying to unpick that first deal.”

CCW Long Play offers “a different kind of advice” which combines Gurr’s A&R expertise (there are discs by The Stereophonics, Big Country, Culture Club and others around the boardroom where we meet) and Cotton’s legal acumen.

The firm has worked with Sandi Thom, Lou Hickey and Kirsten Adamson (daughter of the late Big Country member Stuart Adamson).

“The big issue is in these days of illegal downloads, how do artists make a professional, or at least a semi-professional, career out of their talent,” says Cotton. “The combination of management, legal advice and promotion is more common in the US but less so here – that’s the nut we are still trying to crack, the challenge that we still relish.”