Maureen Matheson

Having set up Matheson Lawson with her friend and colleague Victoria Lawson earlier this year, Ms Matheson has made her mark in the Scottish legal world, something she says her younger self would be surprised by. Brought up in Pollok by her security guard father and cleaner mother, she was the first in her family to go to university. Both her family and her teachers at Crookston Castle Secondary School were hugely supportive of her studies but, while her guidance teacher showed her prospectuses for both Oxford and Cambridge, Ms Matheson says that in the end she chose Strathclyde because it was the one she knew how to get to by bus.

Having turned down an offer from Glasgow University because she didn’t know how to get there, she initially studied psychology but a business law module sparked a change in direction. “I really, really liked it,” she says, “so I switched to law.” After her diploma at Strathclyde, she began her career at conveyancing firm McVey & Murricane, where she was able to put the skills she had learned in the Bon Accord to good use. “Customer service was a huge thing there so I was building on what I’d learned in the pub and also in a job I had at Slater Menswear,” she says.

From McVey & Murricane she moved on to Campbell Cathcart, a smaller general practice, before finding her feet – and future direction – at Macdonald Henderson, the private client practice she joined in 2012. “David Beveridge, the owner, was brilliant at sharing his knowledge of business development,” Ms Matheson recalls. “I was a decent lawyer and could do the job in that sense, but he showed me how to make it a business. He probably doesn’t know how grateful I was for that. We didn’t have entrepreneurs in our family and he introduced me to lots of people [that were helpful to her career].”

Despite the positive experience at Macdonald Henderson, in 2020, during the height of the pandemic, she joined colleagues Alan McKee, Stacy Campbell and Fraser Morrison when they left to co-found standalone firm McKee Campbell Morrison. Though it was a bold move to launch a business at a time of global upheaval, for Ms Matheson the timing felt right.

“Working from home wasn’t an option before Covid but when we started doing that I realised that everything was done in a silo,” she explains. “There were different departments and, because we each had our own clients and contacts, we were essentially each running our own mini-firm. David was the same age as us so it wasn’t like he was going to retire and we’d be coming up behind him. The only way to run something ourselves was to set up on our own.”

Having been part of that firm for a little over four years, in March this year she decided to again branch out on her own, this time with Ms Lawson, who she had first met during her McVey & Murricane days. Like Ms Matheson, Ms Lawson honed her customer-service skills in a completely different sector, working as an air hostess before going into the law. “She has a similar background to me and we run the firm on sheer determination and hard graft,” Ms Matheson says.

The firm is currently made up of four qualified lawyers, two senior paralegals, a conveyancing executive and an office manager, with conveyancing – and good customer service – at the heart of everything it does. “We spent a lot of time creating the firm and coming up with our core values of excellence, collaboration and care,” Ms Matheson says. “Throwing them out there as words doesn’t mean much but the work we’re doing is so personal – it’s people’s homes or their wills – it’s more than just a business interest for us.”

For now, Ms Matheson is happy for the firm to remain small but can see it expanding into commercial property and corporate work in due course. “I’d always be open to the right opportunities,” she says. “If someone comes along and is the right fit we won’t be too rigid in our plan. When we were setting up there were a few bigger firms approached us to go and join them. When you’re being offered lucrative deals you think, ‘I must have something good here’ because they’re not offering you that for nothing.”

It is a world away from the career the girl who was “kicking about Pollok in a Kappa tracksuit” would have imagined for herself. “I wasn’t expecting to own my own law firm at 42 when I was in Pollok building dens,” she says. “But I’ve had a lot of support, a lot of luck and I’ve put in a lot of hard work.”