One of the great pleasures in life as a parent or grandparent is to sit down with your little boy or girl on your knee and read a nice story. One of our current favourites is “The Smartest Giant in Town”, a lovely story about a scruffy giant who decides to buy a suit of new clothes. As he walks around the area, he meets lots of animals who need help which he provides by discarding part of his new wardrobe. His shirt makes a lovely sail for a boat owned by a goat and his shoe a new home for a family of mice. In the end he can barely keep up his trousers and rushes back to the shop where he finds his discarded old cloak. Thank goodness he has found his old scruffy self. Being someone who feels happy in my scruffiness, I know how he feels.

Story telling is a great art and good story tellers are in great demand. I remember when my daughters attended Bishop Martin School with the daughters of Willy Russell, we were privileged to listen to scripts that Willy was writing even before they were published. “Shirley Valentine” was a case in point, and Willy had us all in stiches. Good as the actresses are who have played this role on stage and screen, none for me has surpassed Willy himself reading the script at Bishop Martin PTA all those years ago.

Lawyers have to be good at telling stories. I am not talking about fictional accounts here but picking out the salient parts of the story that clients tell us about their relationship breakdowns, or how they have suffered a terrible accident. What are the bits that are relevant to try and achieve the objective of the client in that particular circumstance? In many ways we have to take the accounts the clients give us at face value. Our job is not to ascertain the truth but to represent what they say to the other party or to a court.

However solicitors are ‘Officers of the Court’ and we have a particular duty not to knowingly mislead a court or the other side in negotiations. Thus, if a client tells us something we know to be untrue, we have to point this out to them and refuse to act if they insist that we continue to utter this untruth and will not back down. Fortunately it is rare for this to lead to us having to withdraw. So the story we put to the third party or the court is told with integrity on our part at least.

We are frequently asked to help families who face a lifetime of commitment and dedication due to an accident around giving birth which leaves their child in a dependent state for the rest of their lives. It is our job to go through all the medical records (with our trained in-house medical experts to begin with) to see what mistakes may have been made so we can be sure that our story to a court (about what happened) can be told accurately and in an expert manner. We do this to demonstrate that the standard of care fell below that which ought to have been provided and the injury occurred as a result.

However, our story telling skills are not just to the court but also to the family about what to expect out of a complex and enduring legal process. We have dealt with this situation many times before but they have not. The family are fearful and emotional and we need to support them through a difficult and life changing process. Most especially we can also help with the complex question of what it is likely to cost to provide the support their child will need as they grow into adulthood and beyond. This can lead to multi-million pound settlements.

Being a lawyer is often about being with our clients through their own life stories and it is a privilege to help make a positive difference in very difficult and complex circumstances.

Those parents need to have the same joy in telling their children their betimes stories safe in the knowledge that the resources will be there for their child’s care way into the future.