Episode one - Austin Lafferty

Hi, my name is Stephen Moore from MLT digital. I’m here today talking to Austin Lafferty, who is the original TV lawyer, certainly in Scotland, and what Austin Lafferty achieved through the development of his personal brand, despite the fact that he didn’t know it was actually a personal brand at that time, has really been quite incredible. He credits that development and that effort to a very significant portion of his overall success in this podcast. What we try to cover is how a bit around how you can develop your personal brand but not that much more about how you can put effort into something that’s not traditionally seen as being a key driver of legal success, namely the billable hour, and how important it is to spend your time and invest that time in speaking to people, engaging with others, developing a rapport with your audience, and over time how then that results in significant returns for you, your business, and your partners. This podcast is brought to you by MLT digital. At MLT digital, we specialise entirely in online business generation for the legal sector, and every year we generate millions of pounds worth of new business opportunities for law firms all over the UK and beyond. If you’d like to find out any more about MLT digital, please visit us at MLT digital.co.uk/podcast. Now we’ll go on to this discussion with Austin Lafferty, which I hope you find useful, informative, and helpful. Firstly, thank you very much, Austin, for your time. We’ve known each other a long time. I was hoping to talk to you today about one aspect of Law Firm success, in particular, which I think you certainly in Scotland were probably the original provocatory of this medium, which is really the development of a personal brand, and you, in particular, used TV a lot in order to grow your own personal brand and thus grow your Law Firm. But I was hoping that we could start initially with a discussion as to when you started in practice, how you started in practice, when you first set your up, and where it is now. Okay, the kind of short narrative is that when I was at school, I was torn between Art School, law school, and drama school. I’d always enjoyed dramatic performance, and yet my father, as you know, was a solicitor, and I knew about his world and was very interested in that because it seemed to me a fascinating and quite exciting thing because he had a very mixed practice, including a lot of jury trials, and I got to sit in on some of those and watch MC Glasgow Sheriff court and elsewhere, so I was intrigued and motivated by that. I was interested in drama because I’ve been in the drama Society at school. I was interested in art, still am because I’ve always drawn and painted, and that’s been a joy in my life. So, I had to make decisions, and I decided to go ahead with legal studies and a legal career, and I’ve never regretted that. But very quickly after I qualified, I really, on a whim and a bit of Glasgow cheek, contacted Radio Clyde and asked if they fancied having somebody on air talking about legal things. Of course, I built myself up with this fantastically expert and experienced lawyer, and I was the 20 minutes qualified that you were before you went in another direction. They took me on, and from there, I managed to make connections with television with BBC, STV, Granada TV, with local radio and newspapers because I was offering something that to them was maybe not unique but certainly unusual: a lawyer prepared to come on and talk about the law but in a way that was accessible to people. I wasn’t hesitant, I wasn’t balanced in the sense that lawyers are always terrified if they go on and say something that they can be held to that they haven’t given the other side or that they haven’t built in some kind of caveat that gets them off the hook. I didn’t have that. I always felt that there were straightforward answers to most legal questions. Sometimes you had to say that’s not the full story, you need to check x, y, and Z, but if somebody says you know I’ve got noisy neighbours because they have parties all night. Every night what can I do about it and I would run through interim interdict report to the police report to the local Authority Environmental Health Department just give nuggets of information and it wasn’t advice it was information. I found it very easy to do because I’d had good training in performance and from when I started on radio I only had one lesson on radio and it was Alec Dixon, the program controller at Radio Clyde, who said if you’re going to speak, speak in sentences with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Doesn’t really matter so much what you put in those sentences but make sure they’re punctuated and spoken properly. That was it and it was true, it is true. So having got into television that was the big thing radio is something of a cottage industry or was then. STV took me on to do various things but one of them was the weekly phone-in on the daytime news program Scott today and from the moment I started that I became a Zed list celebrity, I became a minor cult figure and that was because I was doing this unusual thing and the audiences never get anything wrong they know what television is good bad and indifferent they took me to their hearts as it were so that I would go out into Sauchiehall Street and as I was walking along people would shout hey Austin so a tell probably a big man and this idea of Austin the lawyer became part of the language in not everywhere and not with everybody but with the audience of STV I became theirs Austin they didn’t really get the Lafferty so much but Austin’s an unusual name so Austin there is a LW in the T and that immediately percolated into people seeking me out now it all worked in with by the time I got into television I’d started my own firm in East Kilbride in 1987 Austin Lafferty listers and it was me and a secretary and a what’s or a youth person in those days Youth Opportunity and the government gave you a grant to have somebody and I just started from scratch and uh I got people coming in uh because they had seen me on the television or maybe heard me in the radio and sought me out through the phone book because in those days you couldn’t Google any there wasn’t Google and I built up a practice that way and I learned the lesson very quickly that my name was the badge which was being shown off to my potential clients to the market and therefore uh it was what people would look to if they hadn’t seen a lawyer before and most of them most people hadn’t needed a lawyer uh but then when they did their first thought was what lawyers have I heard of and they’d heard of Joe Beltrami they’d heard of Ross Harper and they’d heard of Austin Lafferty and think going back to that beginning of that what was your motivation for contacting radio Clyde uh fun I enjoyed acting at school and at University I had done Cabaret I had done stand-up comedy I had done some singing with my guitar and I enjoyed the whole business of performance and doing things in front of an audience or done after dinner speaking I started that already I still do that I enjoy entertaining in front of an audience okay and did you have in your mind at all although it started off as being you know sometimes I’ll have ideas and they’ll start off as one thing and then quite quickly I’ll develop a thought process that then I of work out so how’s this actually going to work out for me did you think at that point initially about fun but also in the back of your mind thinking this is also a good way of promoting my business purely personal enjoyment and it was purely filling in that Gap that I was losing by not having gone to the Royal Scotti Academy of Music and drama as I had intended to or not as one of my choices of possibly doing that it was nothing to do with business development that came on the back of it and once it you know arrived on the scene I realised it’s actually more than a marketing or Business Development thing in those days there was a great deal of money in radio and television and I was being paid handsomely right for working and I did corporate television private companies off the back of it was a career and it was a financial um

[10:00] contribution to my um own you know Personal income, a substantial contribution, particularly when it was in the early days of my firm when I didn’t have hundreds and millions of clients, but the two things were such a Synergy, and I use that word properly because it’s exactly what it was, that I would go out to STV or go to BBC to do programs and I would come back to the office and there would be work almost waiting for me there to start or people to phone back and on one occasion a few years later the terrible accident, the Maryhill Factory explosion, I was on STV doing my regular live desk and as I came into the studio they said, “Oh Austin, that’s great brilliant you’re here, oh fantastic so sit down just use your place,” he says, “but we’re not going to do your desk there’s this been this terrible explosion and we need somebody to fill between live feeds so if you would sit there and presenters can H use up Time by turning to you and giving advice on this now that’s exactly what we did. Mike Edwards piece would come in, you know I’m here at Maryhill Plastics Etc and then they would finish that and present would turn to me and say Austin what are some of the legal implications here and I just spoke in general terms I said oh gosh um it’s a terrible thing uh there may very well be a fatal accident Qui or a public inquiry it seems it’s been such a big thing there may be um prosecutions under health and safety at work there may be civil actions by the victims and victims families and none of it’s good but the law is there to support the people that have suffered here. The next day 13 of the victims of that explosion appeared at my office without an invitation and asked to be ADV vised and represented and we took uh quite a number of cases forward which ended up going to the court of session and being uh finalised there so you could obviously draw a direct line between your activity on TV which at that time you were also getting paid for which is different now you know as people develop a following an influencer they really they understand that there’s a quid pro quo there and really they give their time for free in order to generate the publicity the back of that did your activity on TV and on radio begin to dictate the type of practice that you then developed in terms of the workload not initially I started off as a general practitioner in the true sense of that you know in the morning I might be doing an employment tribunal in the afternoon buying selling a few houses and then going out to police station at night to see a criminal client and the next day somebody would want the fish and chip shop sold the lease assigned over time I think the dynamic was and looking back we got incredibly busy and I had to take on more people we expanded because there was so much work coming in but I think naturally over time we began to filter out the things that were either complicated and not you know not we weren’t going to be able to give them the best return in the sense that even if it was a higher fee if we were going to have to devote resources to that to the exclusion of something else because we weren’t big enough to take on everything all the time then naturally we kind of began to default and this is over a long time to a few core areas and it’s those core areas that we now deal with and I would say they are residential and commercial conveyancing Wills power of attorney and executers family law a some kind of commercial just generally acting for commercial clients and a few reparation accident claim type situations but really not much else so the split of your time because this is something that has to be considered by lawyers looking to develop their personal brand and that’s really what it’s referred to now it probably wasn’t then and I imagine for you it wasn’t you weren’t making a conscious effort around developing a personal brand but over time you began to understand what worked a trusted face an approachable face somebody who was able to um as you say uh make the law understandable by providing some concise and brief but clear advice on individual matters as they came in sounds time consuming. Well, it wasn’t in retrospect. I have always worked long hours and been happy to work long hours and felt that was the kind of natural order of things. Now that’s not me saying that I was a martyr or anything—it absolutely not. If I hadn’t enjoyed it, I wouldn’t have worked the long hours, you know? I’d have found something else to do, but I always found it stimulating. And yes, if I had to go to STV Studios for, say, leave the office and come back 4 hours later, then I’d made enough money to make that worthwhile. But also, that was no different from going to Glasgow Sheriff Court to wait for a Child Protection hearing or a breach of the peace deferred sentence. In fact, you could organise your day better working with television and radio companies and newspapers, because they would tend to respect the timing of the appointment or the recording, whereas you go to court, you’re just left like everybody else is to wait and wait and wait. If the courts were a business, they would have been bankrupt years ago, and this isn’t the pandemic; this is years ago, my whole career. And one of the big changes that we made, I’ll say to you, just reflect on what you asked before, one of the big changes we made was we moved away from doing Court work other than, say, family law, where most of it’s done in the office anyway. I could no longer justify waiting all day at Glasgow Sheriff court or Hamilton Sheriff court for a deferred sentence at 3:30 and come back to the office with nobody having heard from me. So if you are a conveyancer or you’re doing Executory or Wills, private attorney, etc., you’re sitting in your office and you are manning the phone, or increasingly it became the email screen, and you could organise things. And so much of even the broadcasting work was done in preparation, you know, elsewhere. I could do it at my desk and then go and do the recording or the live show, whatever it was. So I never found that there was a huge amount of time involved. It was lucrative time in itself, but also it—you just factored it in. If you’re a list are acting in private practice, working in private practice, you’re acting for hundreds of clients anyway through the week. And it always makes me laugh when I see legal dramas on television where they’ve got one case that goes for five episodes. You know, any lawyer will laugh hollowly at that because we’re sitting there hammering away at the keyboard with four different phones going and then we’re Here, There, and Everywhere. So that was a long answer, and the short answer is no, it wasn’t too much of an imposition. Well, it sounds to me as if you were doing business development, but it wasn’t called that. No, but it wasn’t called that, but the end result was it was generating business. It was generating interest in The Firm. You talked about the Stockline Plastics case; the next day the people are at your door. So you’re actually engaged in very valuable activity for your business, which some might consider as not being the lawyer’s job because you’re not recording time against it. And I suppose the point that I’m keen to explore, to get across is that you play to your skill set. Your skill set, obviously, you’ve talked about the drama side of things, you like performing, you liked entertaining. This was something that you found very natural, that you were enjoying doing, and it had a very significant benefit for your firm. Yes, and that time spent there was potentially more valuable for your firm overall than time spent in court or drafting correspondence, etc., that’s right. And that’s a discussion I’ve had in various ways with senior colleagues in the firm. And at this point, one of the other aspects to that, I think, neatly comes in here is that as that business development, which wasn’t called Business Development, developed, and I was asked to do more and more of these kinds of things and also go and do talks to the optimists or, you know, the local collection of retired business folk or the Salvation Army or the synagogue up the road from the office. They were all business development, and they were all vastly worthwhile because in the back of it Everybody would come up to you and say oh I’ve not made a will or I haven’t my lawyer’s in town but I think he’s retired you in GI so but the thing to bring in here is colleagues as I grew that role

[20:00] I couldn’t do everything and I began to hire people and I found that when I hired the right person it made a huge difference because they would take their share of the heavy lifting. I mean I’ve always done case work but they would do more case work than I over time and I couldn’t have done it without the colleagues that I had and have. When I retired last year steep back from management and ownership of the firm, my then partner now boss John Roberts and other colleagues stepped up but it was kind of effortless because the business had already reached a size where clients would come in they wouldn’t expect to see me or even that I would know anything about them. They would see Jennifer or Lisa or Louise or Jonathan and be more than content with that because they were all doing the job I perhaps ended up and I’m still, because the firm’s name hasn’t changed, of something of a figurehead, hardworking figurehead but still a figurehead because the name still I think has some relevance there many and I’m sure most of your colleagues that you’ve brought on would have no interest in doing some of the stuff that you did. That’s true and I hadn’t thought about it like that cause I can’t imagine any not wanting to be front and centre in front of an audience. Well, I think for the vast I mean I’ve discovered that through running my own businesses is that people will chat you about what if they want to leave or x y and Zed and I think everyone has a different attitude towards risk and effort and what they see as being reward etc., and some definitely within MLT they’re very happy doing what they’re doing and they’re happy for me to do my bit, yes, you know, and I’m sure that was the same for you. But to what extent would you um put this work down as a contributing factor to your overall success? I think it must be at least half of it because there are plenty of people who have built up good firms without any thought of marketing. Now there always is marketing because if you do a good job for x, x will tell why, if you do a bad job for them, X will tell why ABC G and V so there is a natural um order of probably other trades and professions doing the same. If you’ve got a good shop selling pizzas then everyone tell you I got my pizza from you know Austin Lafferty limited and somebody else will come so with lawyers you do get good people whose reputation grows organically or osmotically. I did that because we always I think did a decent job for clients and we got a lot of repeat business and people sending their families and what we’re in the fourth generation of some families now in terms of the clients but I also got the ones who would not naturally have come to us but they knew the name and therefore they found us. I can’t I’ve never done any formal research but my shorthand is I think initially it must have been a huge percentage anything up to of the clients that we got we got because of my public notoriety. It becomes more complicated after that because the firm has grown in its footprint because we have you know four offices we got a good website on the and we do I write in the Daily records and we do all sorts of things that get out into the LinkedIn and all these things so it’s more diff and we get the repeat business from some of those who have come to us from far a field who have stuck with us or they’ve then referred us to other people but not you know in terms of publicity and it’s now quite a few years since I was on mainstream television although I did the Martin Lewis show a few months ago and it was like back in the old routine so it’s more complicated now to work it out but I think it was a gigantic boost to the growth of our firm and to what extent over the piece did you develop a set of values for yourself or was that something you ever you ever did in terms of brand values and being quite clear in terms of the messaging that you wanted to put across, well, that is a very interesting question because I don’t know that I mean I’ve always had those values for myself and I always say I’ve got a Protestant work ethic and the Catholic guilt complex so that if somebody comes to consult me for something then either I will do my best for them or I will find them the best person to refer them to or explain it or start it and talk around the generality and then say here are the specifics I can’t deal with that you need to do such and such so I always want people to go away thinking that I have one way or another personally done the best job for them that I can um but in terms of the wide the kind of technical values of how we look as a firm and what message we are broadcasting and all that I really refer to my colleagues to John Roberts in particular who is very savvy when it comes to the technical side of our um our offering but others professional uh consultants including yourself who have all fed into um helping me to understand what is the right way to uh to promote our standards our appearance our ethics our service our quality and quantity to the general public um I mean one thing I do in a kind of old-fashioned way do a fair amount lecturing talking to students lawyers etc. and I talk about the appearance of your office if the client comes in and sees that it’s a mess and that coke can that was lying on the shelf 3 weeks ago when they were here is still there and the place hasn’t been hoovered then you know that that’s all about how you are presenting yourself to people and what they think about your service but on the kind of wider thing I have taken advice and used colleagues and the wider uh sort of consultancy world to help with that is the I remember when we actually took over your website it must be about um 8 million years ago I think it’s about 13 years ago or so uh you know CU you were one of you were relatively a relatively early customer in the online business generation side of things and the key thing I remember in terms of messaging was trust yes a trusted advisor and I think that was something that you were able to establish with a real sense of credibility to visitors who would come online you one they would find your name that would probably resonate with them but then hitting them with the aspect of trust and I imagine that was something that you built up in the background as a result of your TV work I suppose what we really look at doing now with uh lawyers is trying to help them to understand early on what your personal brand values yes and how can you communicate with them to your potential audience so that they resonate they’re authentic they’re backed up by their experience but that you’re clear about them yeah and I think clarity is almost the most important of those but before I address that in a way and I’m not a cynical person but if you are promoting yourself on radio and television and as this kind of trust ambassador you’ve got to live up to it because if you don’t then you know in those days there weren’t social media but there was the daily record in the Sun and if you were caught fleecing somebody or you know not turning up at court or any one of a million things that service providers can make a mess of then you could be monstered is the is the right word for it we chatted about this and when you first started doing this type of work there was actually a ban on lawyers advertising yes so not only were you not competing in terms of marketing to sister marketing to the public more broadly you’d carved out this Nan TV so that was a great position to be in to today that’s obviously different there’s TV radio I mean a lot of the radio advertising comes from law firms however in my view there’s still a lot of opportunity for solicitors to develop their own personal brand with their target audience what advice would you give to them I said earlier and I repeat now because it’s even more relevant the audience is never wrong the audience can tell the difference between a paid advert where you are saying to the audience please come and give us your business and there’s nothing wrong with that but it’s one product one or one approach the audience know that they’re getting the authentic personality character of a lawyer or anybody else uh when they are when they encounter it and whether that encounter is across a desk in an office in a zoom call or watching television radio podcast and one thing I found when I was doing uh particularly live

[30:00] television but radio as well I was just me I was just I was having a conversation with either somebody who was calling in or the presenter or a panel I was having a natural conversation as a person who happened to be a lawyer that has never gone wrong for me because you are authentic you’re naturally authentic because I mean that’s the conversation we’re having I’m not here well he’s not paying me for a start but I’m not here to sell anything I’m here to chat you and I have been colleagues and friends for a long time I’m very interested in this whole thing as I’m kind of uniquely interested in it and we are talking as equals about it I say equals you know more about your side of it I know more about my side of it but we meet in the middle I think if you can have that quality of output that people see then they will naturally warm to it and want to instruct you or refer you or suggest you or recommend you what firms might do if they if they can do it is rather than be seen to be uh conducting a professional and highly honed presentation of services and standards just go let talk to people I it literally cannot fail so I mean it’s interesting know that side of things is because now there’s obviously the opportunity where you can get in front of a lot of people without leaving your office if you were to have a younger solicitor come in to your practice and talk to you about what I’m Keen to do is to spend more of my time developing this personal brand but as a clear offering of Austin Lafferty offers what would you say to them in terms of the time that they should spend doing that what would you be looking for from them in terms of return or what I suppose um room for manoeuvre would you give them in terms of fee earning or fee time Etc well that’s uh that that’s a good question which I have not had to consider in detail but I have a ready answer for it which is the way the way we have set things up is that all of our solicitors uh are responsible fee earners shall we say um and they are all highly motivated and that that’s the way we do things we keep everything to an ethically high standard but we want everyone to be successful everyone in the whole firm to be successful and success means different things for different people so I would say to them I want you to be successful in your brand operations and I want that success to then reflect back in the firm and on you financially and I think although because I’ve retired I don’t make the decisions now but I think that would be my recommendation to my colleagues that you do things on a results basis we’ve never been too uh worried about um certainly never had a stopwatch there at 9:00 in the morning saying you’re a minute late so the extension to that is for individual members of Staff if they have a project where they say well I think I can generate business uh by way of brand awareness brand development and that will you know come back in terms of work and fees and profits we would say to them well that’s fine give us the details but you know unless it was either crazy or disreputable which I’m sure it wouldn’t be with any of my colleagues we would say to them go and try it and we’ll monitor it and we’ll help you and we’ll support you and come so I just think it would be all positive I don’t think it would be drawing breath and saying don’t like the sound of that it it’s you know and the other thing is all of our colleagues know the history of the firm and they know who I am and have been and they are unlikely to suggest anything that’s kind of you know beyond that in fact a number of the business development suggestions have been you know almost in parenthesis to what they know to be our strengths if I were advising for the future I would say well you know look at ways of adding to that brand laterally rather than it. Thank God it seems to still be a name that resonates, but you know there’s got to be some exercise at some point in broadening that out, I would say. Okay, final question, so you’ve recently retired, you’ll still have views, I imagine, on the future of the legal profession and certainly the future for the small to medium-sized law firm. This is a podcast called “Your Law Firm Success.” It’s about helping lawyers and firms of all shapes and sizes understand certain levers that they can pull in order to bring that desired future state to life. What would you be suggesting to young partners or partners in smaller law firms as a plan for success? I would first of all say ignore everything Richard Susskind says. I don’t quite mean that. Richard, again, as an old friend, you’ll know Richard, he was at school with my sister. I’ve known Richard since we were very young. He sells this kind of mega-law digitisation, commoditisation thing, and he’s absolutely right in everything he says. But what I think he seems to forget, and I’m happy to debate it with him, we would do that in a friendly way, is that the trench of lawyer that I’m part of, the small to medium-sized, the suburban, the kind of general practice private client thing, is in an incredibly strong position and is the place to be. If you want an interesting and relatively lucrative career and a career that is as safe as anything can be, which is a different statement today from when I started 40-odd years ago, you have a strong, you should have a strong, if you’ve got a couple of thousand clients, 10,000 clients, whatever it is, you’ve got an incredibly strong pool to market to, to your own services, by way of lateral referrals, repeat business, new business for existing clients. I mean, small example, once you’ve finished a conveyance for a client, offer them a legal health check. Have they got a will? Do they have a power of attorney? What are they going to do when they retire? How near are they to that? Do they have a business? Do they have a succession plan? Do they have assets in their own name or in trust? You know, I’ve just made you four grand in fees there by suggesting those things. Have confidence in your firm, have confidence in yourself, have confidence in your reputation so that when you do go out to market other products or more products to the same people or to more people, that you have the confidence, the rightly have the confidence to that. Our sector is, as I say, very strong. I think the future is very bright. If I wanted, I could get a job tomorrow as a full-time lawyer, dealing with the experience that I’ve got so the skill set that you as a lawyer have, not even just in the legal profession but beyond, but sticking to the legal profession, the skill set you have is a thing to be proud of and to use. So that’s all a very positive message. Build upon what you have because if you’ve been a lawyer for a few years, if you’re in a decent firm, there’s probably a huge amount of unmet potential, untapped potential that you should, and if you’re going to take advice on anything, I would take advice on that, on how to maximise what you have by way of clientele and services and match that with a firm such as yourselves who are able to join that capacity with the wider marketplace to help you communicate to the general public. But it’s not rocket science. Well, I think that resonates with me, the resilience of the legal sector, the small to medium-sized practice makes up by far the biggest sector of the market, and some might describe it as almost recession-proof, as with one area goes down and the other goes up, correct, and so it is a great place to be. And like you, you know, alongside the Richard Susskind discussion is that I think a view has taken of large firm, large practice, which does not reflect in any way the reality of practice for the vast majority of the legal profession. You’ve retired now; you’re spending more time going back to one of your other what was a hobby but now you’re devoting more time to it, which is your artwork. Art, yes, in fact, I just contributed to a we exhibition in London there it sounds very Grand saying that and it was just a few small drawings of um still life of sweeties and sweets. I use colour pencils a lot but my main love is portraiture so if anybody wants a grand looking kind of senior partner portrait for above the desk then I’m your man for that. I’ve always loved drawing and painting. It has been when I was at my busiest running the firm it was therapy. You’d sit in your studio, I say studio, it’s my garage which I now call The Shed of Justice, where I’ve got a little studio and I use my easel and my desk there,

[40:00] and you draw for 2 hours, 3 hours, and the world has left you, then come back to it. But portraits and particularly when I was in practice, everybody seemed to want their dog and cat drawn so I specialised in dogs and cats and managed to get the personality of whatever Pooch it was which put me in good order with people. But again even that I would offer the local Primary School in Gick would come around asking for prizes for their charity Parents’ Day or whatever and I would offer them a portrait of whoever or their son or their dog and that actually got me gigantic amounts of business because they would show this drawing to all the relatives and say it was Austin after the lawyer that did that. So that’s not why I did it but that was a knock-on effect but yes going forward I’m spending much more time drawing and painting absolutely loving it so just to summarise it’s around personal branding and even tying back into the art I think part of the message has been is that if you have a passion for something there are ways in which you can turn that passion and explore that passion which will then have benefits for you commercially despite that not being the objective but it comes from an honest part of you hopefully that’s all of it a place of Integrity but a place of passion and I think people buy that passion I that is in a nutshell I mean the old-fashioned thing as a model is lots of lawyers play golf I don’t like golf I’ve tried it but I don’t play it but the lawyers that in golf clubs they got a million clients from the golf club so really what I do is just a larger version of that in different ways whether it’s the art or whether it’s the broadcasting or just communication generally if people see that you’re authentic and that you’re kind of an ordinary member of society albeit with special skills they will warm to you and in fact going back to when television started just for us to finish when back to the start of Television the thing that I found all the time was that when I spoke to people who had seen me on television they would say oh you’re just like an ordinary person lawyers are not like that are they and people’s view of lawyers is this austere authority figure behind the desk probably with pin specs and a severe expression and you know a high priest of the art of law rather than integrated with the rest of us with the community and I think that was the biggest lesson that I had was that and you know glass expression it’s nice to be nice well it’s more than that it’s important it’s essential to feel for clients and potential clients to feel a connection yes there’s a respect and yes there’s a difference in both directions because I always pay respect to people no matter who they may be they come in they’re deserving of that as much as I am but if they feel that you are on their side and that you are part of their team then that’s a winning combination if they feel that you are talking down to them that’s not okay thanks Austin been my pleasure Stephen thank you very much for your time and enjoy well I suppose your exhibition’s imminent exhibitions maybe at the GMA with Banksy well you never know um it won’t be a second career in the sense of trying to make a lot of money out of it CU unless you’re very lucky there  is not much money in art but there is huge personal satisfaction in doing it oh congratulations thank you I hope you enjoyed listening to that and I hope you learn a lot from it I know I did there are a lot of lessons there that maybe one would immediately jump to the conclusion because of the time when Austin Lafferty first started in TV has as much relevance to today as one might think but then once you listen to it and you realise really the messages are the same it’s just the medium that’s changed so thank you for listening I hope you enjoyed it please subscribe please leave us a positive review and if there’s anything else you’d like to learn from us or from or from Austin get in touch with us at MLT digital.