Margaret Taylor

Katrina Ashbolt wouldn’t live or work anywhere but the Highlands. Growing up in Elgin, she always knew that she wanted to become a lawyer, having become hooked on courtroom dramas like LA Law from an early age. But, after leaving home to study in Aberdeen, she quickly realised that she wanted

Alastair Gray knew rradar was a firm he wanted to join when he turned up for his interview to hear the strains of Get Down by the rapper Nas blasting through the open-plan office. He had, he says, “come to a crossroads” in his career. Hearing that music and seeing the ping-pong tables an

When Brandon Malone dropped dead five years ago, it was a defibrillator machine – and quick-thinking hotel staff – that saved his life. Luckily an automatic-external defibrillator had been at hand and, though his heart had stopped for a full 20 minutes, the people using it were able to s

Ian Moir is well known in legal circles both as one half of Glasgow-based criminal law firm Moir & Sweeney Litigation and as the outspoken convener of the Law Society of Scotland’s Criminal Legal Aid Committee. He almost didn’t become a lawyer at all, though. Having been told while a

Along with Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain and Advocate General Catherine Smith, Solicitor General Ruth Charteris is blazing a trail for women at the very top of the Scottish legal profession, but, with no role model for her to look up to during her school days in Cumbernauld, she very nearly didn’

When he describes his arrival at the Scottish bar as being “a bit convoluted”, Ian Forrester KC really isn’t kidding. Having studied history and English and then law at the University of Glasgow, Forrester began his career with Maclay Murray & Spens in the mid-1960s with the or

Scots lawyers have long made the case for overhauling the legal aid system but, with the Scottish government agreeing only a small number of fee uplifts since it commissioned a review of the sector close to a decade ago, many have come to believe that their pleas are destined to fall on deaf ears. W

When it came to finding career inspiration, Scottish Solicitors Bar Association (SSBA) president Simon Brown didn’t have to look much further than his own front room. Though, when he was a child growing up in Irvine, his mum Louise was a teacher and dad Matthew an engineer, by the time Brown w

Jen Ang is a firm believer that equality should be at the heart of the law and that, equally, the law should uphold those equalities. That isn’t always the case, though – which is why Ang co-founded social justice legal organisation Just Right Scotland in 2017. Just Right has proved more

Growing up, Nina Taylor had no thoughts about becoming a lawyer. The first in her family to go to university, she’d started life above the Rainbow Café in Coatbridge, which was run by her Italian father’s family, and wanted to become a journalist. Having just taken up the chairman

Rebecca Samaras never planned to be a lawyer. Having grown up in Ramsgate and then Liverpool, it was history and archaeology that was her passion – Alexander the Great was her hero and as a youngster she was determined that she was going to find his tomb. But, having found herself a single mot

It is just over three months since the merger between Morton Fraser and MacRoberts completed and the enlarged firm’s chief executive Chris Harte is pretty pleased with how things are going. Practice groups are getting to grips with their new capabilities and staff at Morton Fraser MacRoberts &

When Daria Shapovalova arrived in Aberdeen to study for a PhD in international law she never imagined that a decade later she would still be there, lecturing at the University of Aberdeen and leading the institution’s Centre for Energy Law. Her initial encounter with the city had been inauspic

When he was named the Law Society of Scotland’s In-house Rising Star of 2023, Too Good To Go global legal counsel Christopher Knudsen said the achievement was down to the help he had received from others and that he would equally like to “help others in the legal profession in the same w

In 2019, Gillian Treasurer was on the cusp of moving from Wales to take up the coveted role of Scottish Rugby Union’s legal head when she got news that turned her world upside down. “For about a year I’d been feeling absolutely exhausted and quite ill and the day before I left Wale