THE LEGAL profession has changed massively since Graham Matthews started his career in the late 1970s.

For the most part Mr Matthews, who took over from Eilidh Wiseman as president of the Law Society of Scotland last week, believes the changes have been positive, specifically when it comes to the way technology has simplified legal processes.

When it comes to rural practice, however, he is less convinced. As a partner at high street firm Peterkins, which has offices in Aberdeen and north-east towns Inverurie, Keith, Alford and Huntly, he ought to know.

“There’s a challenge for rural practices,” he said. “My firm has a vacancy in Huntly, which is a lovely town - it’s a nice place to live, it’s a nice lifestyle - but we’ve basically had no applications. Imagine what it would be like if you were based further north or were more remote.”

Mr Matthews acknowledged that the law is not alone in struggling to convince new entrants to give up their city lives for a career in the provinces, with medicine in particular suffering the same fate.

But as a rural lawyer who for the next year will head the solicitors profession in Scotland, he aims to use his position to do what he can to encourage others to follow a similar path.

“There’s clearly an issue with folk not aspiring to live and work in country areas,” Mr Matthews said. “One of my aims is to try to convince people that working in a rural area is a lot more attractive than they might think.”

He could have his work cut out for him, and not just because more-junior lawyers are unwilling to leave the cities. Recent figures from the Law Society showed there are still far more students completing the post-graduate legal diploma, which sits between a law degree and a traineeship for prospective lawyers, than there are jobs, meaning rural firms that are struggling to recruit could tap into a fairly wide talent pool at the most junior end.

Yet, as Mr Matthews said, “a lot of country firms don’t want to take on trainees”.

“The view they take is that they’ll train them up and then they’ll go and work in the big cities,” he said. “It’s very difficult, but one of the problems they have is that people look at a trainee as a cost, even though they’re not that expensive. The first year salary is £18,000, which is way below what a young teacher gets, but firms are still reluctant to take them on on the basis that it is a cost.”

Though law firms are naturally cautious, this aversion to taking on extra costs has its roots in the financial crisis of a decade ago, which has resulted in all firms having to do more for less, regardless of where they are based. A knock-on impact of that, according to a number of recent studies, is that lawyers are now among the most dissatisfied workers in the UK.

Pointing to one report, which found that solicitors are more unhappy than unemployed people, Mr Matthews said the profession’s ever more prominent obsession with fee targets could be partly to blame.

“When I was young we didn’t have fee targets,” he said. “When the John Grisham book The Firm came out we thought it was fantasy - they were doing things like putting in client numbers when photocopying so they could automatically bill for it, but most firms now have some form of time recording and that’s putting pressure on some of the younger lawyers.

“I would like to look a lot more at that in the next year or so. Was that survey just a one off or is there genuinely an issue? If there is we need to do something about it.”

While that would be a longer-term project for the Law Society to engage in, two issues Mr Matthew is hopeful of seeing resolved within his year as president are the Law Society’s disputes with the Scottish Legal Complaints Commission (SLCC) and the Scottish Legal Aid Board (SLAB).

The SLCC issue relates to how complaints against solicitors are classified, with the Law Society appealing a decision by the commission to the Inner House of the Court of Session. While the case relates to just one complaint, Mr Matthews said the outcome will impact on hundreds of others.

“At the end of the day, all we want is for the court to tell us what to do so we can get on with it,” he said.

The issue with the SLAB, meanwhile, relates to the amount of legal aid criminal lawyers are entitled to for being on call to advise on police station interviews.

“When someone is arrested they are entitled to legal advice, the question is what will the solicitor get paid for being called out for two hours in the middle of the night,” Mr Matthews said. “This will have to be resolved because there’s a real risk that quite a few of our members will withdraw from the scheme.”

While the SLCC matter should come to a head within the next few weeks, the legal aid issue may outlive Mr Matthews’ term, with a wider review into the legal aid system as a whole being launched by the Scottish Government earlier this year.

As Mr Matthews said: “I expect the legal aid thing will run and run.”