The Practitioner: Doing time with clients

IT’S BEEN an extremely busy past couple of weeks in our practice, with a lot of my time spent on the road.

I have been up and down the country visiting clients and listening to a wide range of stories over numerous cups of coffee in the process.

I thought I knew most of our clients pretty well but on my travels over the past couple of weeks I have been surprised by a couple of thier revelations.

Bizarrely, two different clients at different ends of the country both felt the need to tell me how they had experienced brushes with the law in their earlier years.
The first client was accused of ABH and BGH, with the second actually admitting that he had served time inside for a similar crime.

If you’d asked me to pick two clients who were most likely to have revealed these past histories to me they would have been fairly low down the list. It just goes to how you can’t judge a book by its cover. They are probably the best-dressed, best presented clients on our list.

On reflection I guess it shows that they treat me as a friend as well as an adviser so that’s nice I guess, although it does make me look at them in a slightly different way, even though both offences were a long time ago. And having listened to the circumstances of the situations it also makes me doubt once again the adequacies of our legal system.

They are both successful businessmen now in their own right despite their brushes with the law, and that in itself is a lesson to be learned by anyone who finds him or herself in a similar position.

They have both used the experience to motivate themselves to succeed and to strive to always be in control of their own destiny in the future.

They say things come in threes – I’m busy trying to work out which client is going to confess next, and for what.

The Practitioner’s uncensored thoughts come from within their own practice – having left a regional firm in the heart of England