YOU would be forgiven for thinking that Glasgow lawyer Aamer Anwar, who was named Solicitor of the Year at The Herald’s Law Awards of Scotland in November, spends most of his time shouting the odds from the court steps.
This is, after all, the man who was charged with – and later cleared of - contempt of court after he branded the 2007 conviction of his client Mohammed Atif Siddique on terrorism charges a “tragedy for justice”.
Yet, while campaigning for “those who are dispossessed, those who are considered evil” is what Mr Anwar set up his firm to do, the reality of running a business means such work accounts for just half of his firm’s interests.
The rest is made up of an array of criminal work, with the firm also diversifying into what Mr Anwar terms quasi-civil matters in response to ongoing cuts to the Legal Aid budget.
“Over the years we recognised that there were going to be cuts to the Legal Aid budget and if criminal law firms didn’t learn to diversify and go into areas that they wouldn’t normally touch then they would die,” Mr Anwar said. “When I started 99 per cent of the payments we received were from Legal Aid – now it’s 50/50 [with the rest coming from fee-paying private clients].”
That diversification has led Mr Anwar to represent doctors, surgeons and police officers in disciplinary hearings, with the skills he has honed on the criminal circuit transferring to a tribunal-style environment.
“It can be quite daunting to go into a hearing - they want someone who will stand up and fight on their behalf,” he said.
His firm also actively targets those accused of a white-collar crime, something that has opened the door to referral arrangements with the type of commercial firms Mr Anwar has traditionally viewed as the legal Establishment.
“Businessmen, when something goes wrong, will knock on the door of a commercial lawyer but I’ve never understood that - if you need heart surgery why go to a dentist?,” he said. “When clients come to us and their case has commercial aspects we’ve developed referral relationships with commercial firms.”
For Mr Anwar, doing this type of work, which is handled on a day-to-day basis by his office’s four other solicitors, allows him to pursue the kind of work that led him into a career in the law in the first place: campaigning.
Outside legal circles Mr Anwar is probably best known for the work he did on the Surjit Singh Chhokar murder case, finally securing the conviction of Ronnie Coulter last year after an 18-year fight for justice. The fact that he receives no payment at all for this type of work is part of the reason he shouts so loudly about it.
“There’s a snobbishness in the legal fraternity about what I do as a lawyer,” he said. “When I spoke out after the murder of Asad Shah [Mr Anwar called for unity among Scotland’s Muslim community after the Glasgow shopkeeper was stabbed to death] some people said ‘he’s making a comment on that but that’s not to do with the law’ but the point is it’s still making an impact and when people are in a situation where they need a lawyer they will say ‘get me that lawyer’.”
He continued: “A lot of people assume that the high-profile cases come from Legal Aid but they won’t fund campaigning lawyers from the start and it takes two or three years of campaigning to get to the doors of the court. Chhokar was an 18-year campaign and it was all unpaid.”
Indeed, it is this dynamic that ultimately saw Mr Anwar break away from his original firm, Beltrami Berlow, to set up on his own, despite being made partner just three years after qualifying as a solicitor.
“[In my early career] I wanted to be a partner because I wanted some control over the campaigning cases I want to be involved in. When you’re an employee the driving force is always to make more money for the firm,” he said. “When I was a trainee I was doing the Chhokar case, which was very high profile but earning the firm zero money, which wasn’t very popular.”
Despite his own moves to insulate against cuts to Legal Aid, Mr Anwar said all lawyers “have a duty” to defend the funding system, noting that “there is no point in saying this is the best criminal justice system in the world if you don’t fund it”.
“A strong crown is only strong if the defence is strong too,” he said. “The word is ‘justice’ - it doesn’t matter if you’re working for the prosecution or the defence.”
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