Being a professional

I said last month that I was taking one of my daughters to the US for a semester at the University of Vermont. I am writing this on the plane home, having, I admit, shed a few tears at leaving her 3,000 or so miles away. She of course is excited and happy, already loving the new experiences and somewhat different style of university life from that she has in Aberdeen. It is so hard as a parent to let a child spread their wings, but it is so important to encourage them to do so, to become their own person.

I am so grateful to my own parents for encouraging me to aim high, to do what I wanted to do and to spread those wings when I was my daughter’s age. So it is all the more poignant that the first days of 2024 also saw the loss of my own dearly beloved dad. He had been ill for many months and it was not entirely unexpected but it has been, naturally, a very sad beginning to the year. I have said before that I am proud to have been state school educated, the first in my family to go to university, and most definitely to study law. Dad was, I know, hugely proud of what I have done, and it is a matter of great pleasure that dementia had not totally taken hold of him when I was both elected and then installed as President of our Society. Dad understood the pride in being a member – let alone the leader – of a profession.

Dad too was a professional, a proud member of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. He got there the hard way. A clever man, a scholarship allowed him and his twin brother to attend Robert Gordon’s College in Aberdeen, a huge privilege for two boys from a very simple background. He worked hard and took his professional exams in building surveying through evening classes while working to support his young family. His career was mostly in local Government, and his professionalism saw him give back through membership of various public organisations in the building control sector. His commitment to developing the world of building control was unstinting and he was genuinely interested in the work. He also spent years assessing building surveyors at the start of their careers, through their APCs – he loved doing that (though it was challenging for me sometimes knowing my dad was assessing contemporaries!).

And is that not one of the most important aspects of being a professional? Learning, developing your own and others’ learning, giving back to that profession and the wider world in your work. The effort so many of you put into our profession is huge – contributing to our work on developing policy and legislative proposals, giving your time to our Council and committees, training and striving to make our profession more equal, diverse and inclusive. Thank you. You should be proud of your contributions, as was my dad in his profession.

Dad’s pride in being a professional encouraged me, first to become a solicitor, then later in my career to join Council and committees, and to take an interest in training and those high professional standards that mean a great deal to me. I wish I had done this sooner – and I say that to those new solicitors I meet at admission ceremonies. I encourage each of you to think about it. Our first Council meeting of 2024 will spend some time looking at our Council and other structures to improve and develop what we do and how we do it. There are vacancies on our Council and on committees – I really want to encourage our members to consider what you can do, as a fellow professional, to contribute. We all have something to give to make our profession the very best it can be. Dad set me a great example of being a member of a profession, and I doubt I would be in this privileged position of leading the legal profession in Scotland without his support and encouragement. I will be forever grateful.

At the moment I am spending a lot of time on another major aspect of what makes us a profession: regulation. It is a mark of being a profession that we regulate ourselves, holding ourselves to high standards continuously. The regulatory reform Bill continues to make its way slowly through the parliamentary process and it was pleasing at the end of 2023 to see that the work we have done on one of our major concerns, regarding the independence of our profession, appears to have contributed to a commitment from the Scottish Government to address that concern.

That is not, of course, the only part of the draft Bill on which we commented. Work remains to be done, and we continue to work closely with other stakeholders on that. There is much to be commended in the Bill, but there is much also that we would like to see improved – reforms to improve our complaints process, for example, on which we have been working for more than a decade. So I was delighted to see that MSPs on the main committee for the Bill, the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee, have recognised our concerns and backed the independence of the profession in their report published last week.

So, after a mid-presidency short break, it’s back to the desk for me. I hope 2024 has started more smoothly for you and that the year ahead is successful.

 My Presidential playlist continues to grow, although this month it was harder to choose.

• A Sky Full of Stars, Coldplay – this is one of my favourite tracks from a favourite band, and yes, the sky has another star this month.
• American Town, Ed Sheeran – even though the lyrics need to be switched to “Scottish girl in an American town”, I can’t help but listen to this song with a smile on my face.