When Alan Solomons became director of rugby at the South African franchise Southern Kings, he found his skills and experience as a lawyer were almost as useful as his rugby knowledge when it came to getting a squad ready a Super Rugby campaign.

"We all had to muck in," he said. "I did the negotiating of the contracts and drafted most of the legal stuff for them. I got my hand in at law again."

Well, it's always good to have a few strings to your bow. In which light, it was tempting to ask him if there was anything on his cv that might come in handy now he holds the reins at Edinburgh. Something in the disaster management line, perhaps? Maybe a spot of trauma counselling? A sideline in taking fallen stock to the knacker's yard?

Solomons seems to have an upbeat approach to things, but it will take more than a sunny disposition to breathe life into his new team this season. The South African has inherited a side that is flat out on the canvas, horizontal heavyweights of European rugby. Edinburgh have a decent budget and a set of players many other clubs would covet. Yet for the past 12 months they have been pretty close to hopeless.

There was a powerful sense last term that Edinburgh were running on the memory of reaching the previous season's Heineken Cup semi-finals. Or possibly basking in it. They started the campaign badly and only went downhill.

But while Solomons, 63, was dutifully polite about Edinburgh's achievements in Europe, he also made it pretty clear he thought their run to the last four had been a fluke bordering on an aberration.

"One doesn't want to take anything away from that because it was a wonderful achievement," he said guardedly. "But the Heineken Cup has a limited number of games. You play six games in the pool, and the pool depends on the draw. Then the knockout stages are one-off games. It's not a competition like the RaboDirect PRO12, where you have 12 teams and you play 22 matches. It was a wonderful achievement, but you have to see it in perspective."

Which, in his book, means writing it off as ancient history. Just as he did when he took over at Ulster a dozen years ago. They, too, had enjoyed a superb Heineken run a couple of seasons earlier, lifting the trophy after an emotion-charged 21-6 victory over Colomiers in Dublin in January 1999. But complacency had set in and Solomons made it his business to change the culture at the club. "There's no question that we had to adapt to him, rather than the other way round," one Ulster player of that era said recently. "We thought we were pretty professional before he came, we had just won the Heineken Cup after all, but he really took things to a new level.

"He's a very pleasant guy, very intelligent and articulate. People tend to like him as a person. But he can also be very abrasive as a coach, very challenging with players. He's demanding, and he usually gets what he wants."

At Edinburgh, that will almost certainly start by establishing the clear lines of authority by which the club will be run. The story goes that Solomons' failure at Northampton - where he was sacked after eight straight defeats in 2004 - was because he lost a power struggle with senior players. It is not a fight he intends to lose again.

Solomons said: "It's how an organisation runs. My job is head coach and I have to head up the team. That's just the way it is. I've had a little interaction with the players and I feel very positive about it. They seem like a decent group from what I can tell, and they seem fairly receptive as well. That has been a big positive."

There is a deliciously ironic twist here. Solomons' first game on his return to club coaching in the Northern Hemisphere will take place on Friday at the Franklin's Gardens ground he vacated so suddenly nine years ago as Edinburgh take on Northampton in a warm-up game for the new season.

By then the coach will have spent a week with his new charges at Loughborough University's high performance campus. The institution's facilities are world renowned, but you suspect Solomons is more interested in what might be inside his players' heads than in bleep tests and bench presses.

He has already said he will hold one-to-one meetings with every player and there will also be a general clear-the-air session in which the ground rules for the future will be laid down. All very well, but Edinburgh will be judged by what they do on the pitch, not the psychiatrist's couch.

Solomons has given himself two months to get to the root of the side's problems and figure out what they need to do next, but dismissed a suggestion he will take a back seat during that period and let former caretaker Steve Scott, who is now forwards coach, lead the training.

"My job is to take charge of the team," Solomons said. "That's the end of it. Stevie's job is to coach the forwards. His job is to see that our set-piece is good, the scrum is good, our line-out is good and that we maul effectively."

Will two months be enough? Solomons says his legal background gave him "the ability to analyse what is important, the ability to absorb a lot of facts quickly, to sift through it and get to the kernel of the problem".

What it didn't give him, however, was the large cheque book he probably needs to sort out some critical areas in the team - the most critical of all being at fly-half. If he can scrape the readies together, don't be surprised if Solomons makes a move for Demetri Catrakilis, his playmaker at Southern Kings.

It will take more than a change of attitude to sort Edinburgh out. "My approach is that what has happened is history," said Solomons. "We've got to start afresh, put it behind us and build a competitive team here."