Back to the future; the return of the 'family lawyer'

Given the changing dynamics of estate planning and private client law there is an opportunity for lawyers and law firms to reassert the principle of the 'family lawyer'; someone to whom a family can turn to time and again for legal needs. Not a purely transactional relationship, but one based on trust and mutual respect. 

It is one of the topics discussed in a wide-ranging discussion on the latest Today's Wills and Probate Podcast as host David Opie is joined by Lakshmi Turner, Chief Executive of the Association of Lifetime Lawyers, formerly Solicitors for the Elderly (SFE).

There is certainly an opportunity for a more holistic approach to create significant benefits for both clients and firms, helping individuals plan not only for death through wills and estate planning, but also for life, health, finances and future care needs. With the Great Wealth Transfer in full swing, and an increasingly aging population it's a busy time to be a private client lawyer. 

Turner discusses the origins of the membership body, first conceived by Gordon Ashton, then Deputy Master of the Court of Protection, and a group of specialist practitioners who sought to create an organisation dedicated to training, best practice and supporting lawyers advising older people.

One of the organisation’s most enduring strengths is it collaborative community says Turner. From its earliest days, members have shared knowledge and expertise through forums and discussion groups, creating a culture where solicitors support one another with complex client matters. She argues that this collective expertise ultimately benefits clients, who indirectly gain access to the insight and experience of thousands of specialist lawyers. 

The organisation has focused not just on legal skill, but also soft skills for lawyers advising older and vulnerable clients who must also understand safeguarding, capacity assessment, communication, advocacy, and the identification of abuse. These are skills rarely taught during formal legal education but are increasingly critical in practice. The organisation’s Lifetime Care in Practice Award was developed to address this gap, providing externally accredited training designed to improve the quality of client care. 

The Association of Lifetime Lawyers celebrates its 30th anniversary in 2026 with the newly launched Twilight Awards the highlight of a year of celebration.

The Today's Wills and Probate podcast is available on your preferred podcast provider, and at www.todayswillsandprobate.co.uk. Subscribe today to hear all the latest news and views across the wills and probate sector.

Thank you to our podcast sponsors LEAP Estates, Estate Research, Property Ladder Group and Finders International.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

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SPEAKER_02 0:23

Hello and welcome along to the latest Today's Worlds and Probate podcast. Today I am joined by Lax Miturner, CEO of the Association of Lifetime Lawyers. For those of you uninitiated, and it's a little while ago now that you rebranded, to be fair, once the solicitors for the elderly, but now the Association of Lifetime Lawyers, as I say. Conversation today is all about some of that history, some of the background to the organization, and also looking at the future as well. We've just had conference, which gives a lot of members the opportunity to get together. So great to have you on the podcast, Lakshmi. Thanks so much for joining.

SPEAKER_01 1:05

I'm very happy to be here, David.

SPEAKER_02 1:08

Let's start with a little bit about yourself. Tell us who you are and what you do for those people who don't necessarily know who you are.

SPEAKER_01 1:19

Well, as you've said, my name's Lakshmi Turner, and I'm the chief executive of the Association of Lifetime Lawyers. I am not myself a solicitor. So the entire board of the association are all solicitors or chartered legal executives. So I'm the one person with a bit of common sense to run a membership organisation. But having been there for a very, very long time, 23 years, and having read every single word that's ever been written in a newsletter, attended every training course, I think I do know and understand our marketplace pretty well these days.

SPEAKER_02 1:52

Your background's marketing, though, isn't it? Predominantly.

SPEAKER_01 1:56

Yes, I my first job, I was an international marketing manager, and the company I was with paid a fortune to send me on lots of lovely training courses at Cramfield Business School. And then after three years, I decided to do an MBA. So I've always been sort of focused on business strategy and marketing strategy. And I've noticed these days that people tend to split marketing from strategy and communications and set separate them out, which I always find a little bit strange because I think you need some strategy and some objectives before you can get all nice and have fun with communications. But that's just my little view of life.

SPEAKER_02 2:34

No, I I I think I'd be inclined to agree. I mean, it's not a topic of conversation necessarily for this podcast, but I mean there's a whole podcast there in communication, marketing, strategy. Throw sales into that equation as well, of course, because they're intrinsically linked.

SPEAKER_01 2:50

Yes, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 2:53

You say that you came into the organization 23 years ago. I'm guessing it was quite a different organization back then.

SPEAKER_01 3:00

Well, it was very, very small. That's all I can say at that point. I mean, it started in 1996 as it was an idea, and I'd like to talk a bit about the history of that. We'll come and we'll come on to that a bit later on. So by the time I started, I I joined in 2004. The organisation was well underway by the time I started. It had its own website, and very, very interestingly, it had a forum already. So it was already building the SFE, as we called it then, the SFE family. These days one wouldn't call it a family, one would call it a community, but I still call it a family. And what struck me from the very, very beginning was the way in which members supported each other. So when I joined back in 2004, there was already a forum, which I thought was absolutely incredible because there were 300 members or so at the time. And this forum was very, very lively back then. People would post on the forum and ask a question about a they had. It would be anonymized, but I was absolutely amazed to see the number of people who offered help and advice on the topic. And as we've grown and grown and grown as an organization, people often say that the forum is probably one of the best benefits we give them. And the real heavyweights in the area pipe up on the forum. I mean, Caroline Biananska posts regularly. I saw one from Ian Bond a couple of days ago, John Bunker, Kate Searle, all sorts of people, no matter that they will help the younger people, or people just got a scenario they're not quite sure about. So I kind of want to say to the public: if you come to a lifetime lawyer, you're not just getting advice from one lawyer, you're potentially getting it from up to 2,000 lawyers, which is absolutely phenomenal. But you can't really put that in your marketing material. But it's one of those things because people said to me when I joined, you know, oh yes, STEP's got a forum, but people are a bit afraid to ask questions on that forum because it's it's much more formal than we are. We're much more of a family warm feel. So people do feel that they can ask questions on the forum, which is great.

SPEAKER_02 5:13

So let's go back to the start there, 1996. It's uh I mean before the iPhone, if anybody can sort of imagine that era, but barely before broadband dial-up internet, all that kind of thing. What was the SFE? You said it started out as an idea. Why did it start? What was the sort of original concept behind it?

SPEAKER_01 5:34

Okay, well, I think we need to back up a bit and just look at the societal context in the UK at the time. So, towards the end of the 20th century, you get vast socio-demographic and technological changes which are really starting to transform society and transform the way we operate. So you had the old model, which was people had a job for life, they would then retire, and they probably only live a short time post-retirement. But things started to transform relatively quickly. So a new model emerged, which was job uncertainty and insecurity, people retiring early or working longer, people living longer. And so that was spawning increasingly complex health issues, which are brought on by a combination of lifestyle factors and advances in medical treatments. So it really, really changed rapidly in the you know, the latter half of the 20th century. And as you quite rightly said, you had the start of internet, electronic communications, online commerce, and this strange concept came about in the world called the aging population, which was not something we had before. You know, you look back to Shakespeare time, and you know, Romeo and Juliet were sort of 12 and 13, and everyone was pretty much dead by the time they were 30. So, you know, you didn't have a chance to age, but you know, post the industrial revolution and post the 20th century, people are living longer and longer and longer. Now we might want to consider quantity versus quality, but that's a whole other discussion. So, as I said, you've got the concept of the aging population around the world, but especially in Europe and especially in the developed world. But on the other hand, you've got industry, governments, healthcare, and the law not keeping up with any of it because it's just changing so quickly. So if you think about private client at the time, it was basically tax planning, estates, asset protection for the wealthy. And really, the only nod to capacity at all was testamentary capacity. Mental capacity as the broad subject it is today wasn't a thing. So, you know, we've got the chaotic emergence of new technologies all coming in really quickly. You've got the digital world, and you've got businesses trying to push people online by offering them their cheapest rates online. So for the first time, we've now got this whole concept of exclusion, because there are those people who, for whatever reason, may not be able to access the digital world. And on top of that, for those of you old enough to remember, there was a dot-com bubble. So all these companies' websites came up and did all these exciting things, and then loads and loads of them, really high-profile ones, went bust. So this frightened a lot of older people who weren't brought up with technology, and they were thinking, well, I'm going to stick to what I know, bricks and mortar, pen and paper. So, in summary, we've got people living longer, they've got complex health needs, we've got the context, the concepts of capacity, diminishing capacity, the greater need for care, and the greater need for better financial planning. So, with all this sprueing around in the background, an amazing man by the name of Gordon Ashton, who was the deputy master of the Court of Protection, came up with the concept of an association of lawyers who specialized in advising older people because he was shocked by the lack of knowledge and know-how displayed in the court by people who came before him, with the exception of a handful of people. So he was talking to this handful of people about his shock and dismay, and this is how the idea that would become SFE was actually born, i.e., a training and best practice organisation for solicitors who would advise older clients. So there were five original founders who all put their own money on the table, and they had lots of meetings to try and decide what the name was, which was a thorny issue from day one, what the membership criteria should be, and what the aims of the organisation should be. And by 1999, they had their first AGM and their first conference, and it was really thanks to the wonderful Caroline Biolanska that the organisation really took off because she was really pushing for training and best practice, and she had a lot, and she still has a lot of drive and guts and determination. So she was a leading light and encouraged lots and lots of people to join us, and that's what they did. And then this whole concept of sharing best practice and sharing ideas and supporting one another was already well under the way by the time I joined in 2004.

SPEAKER_02 10:37

And I mean that's still very much the mantra of the organization, isn't it? That the whole best practice training. I mean, the conference itself, for example, is you know a shiny example of that. You take a case study and you dissect it in great detail, don't you?

SPEAKER_01 10:53

Yes, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, we we've always been quite trailblazing at lifetime lawyers. And when I looked back on it, we first introduced online training back in 2011 when it wasn't trendy. And then we had to, I wouldn't say reinvent, but do something because post-COVID the number of people attending training was dropping because we were charging for it. So what we then did was we looked back to what are our aims and objectives, and it's very straightforward. We want everyone who works with older and vulnerable people to be equipped with the skills they need to give the best possible advice and support. So we then decided well, maybe if we included training within the membership fee, so increase that membership fee and include training within that fee, that might encourage more people to join. Because having asked members what was going on, they said that now you know the SRA and their implement wisdom decided to abolish CPD, there was no necessity for solicitors to go out and find paid for training. So they every time that we put on a training course that they needed to pay for, they had to go and ask for permission. So if you put on 10 or 12 courses a year, you've got to go and ask for permission that many times a year. Whereas if people would agree to the membership fee, which they only have to ask for once a year, then all the training that we do, they don't have to go and ask someone else whether they can do it, they can just attend it. So our numbers absolutely shot up. So we have now over 70% of members attending our training. So we we're very heartened by that because it means people really do want to be the very best that they can be, and we we we try and help them with that by using the best trainers that we can.

SPEAKER_02 12:46

What do you focus on with the training? I mean, you know, you talk about that huge societal change back in the end of the 20th century. I mean, we're we're you know imminently, if not already there in terms of the next big thing in private client, which is of course the great wealth transfer. But the capacity feels like a a monumental issue. I mean, you only need to look at sort of contentious cases to see that you know it is the dominant feature of so many claims. But is it the case that you know private client lawyers need to be much, much better attuned to the whole capacity issue? You know, they know the law, but this is this is sort of the the the next big thing or or the big thing they need to be focused on.

SPEAKER_01 13:38

I definitely agree with you, David. And we I mean our reason for being has always been about soft skills because you know, STEP is there, a very excellent organization that it is, it provides a lot of technical training. We have always said that because we specialise in older and vulnerable people, the technical side is almost taken as red when you join us, although we put on a lot of technical training as well. Where we want to focus is on spotting signs of abuse, safeguarding, advocating, how do you assess capacity, what are you looking for? All the kind of soft skills that you would never be taught in law school, and it's just there the training isn't out there. So, way back in 20, well, we started in 2012 when we launched our soft skills qualification back in 2014, which is now called the Lifetime Care in Practice Award, and that focuses on exactly that side of it. And we, when we do our training course, we do a combination of technical things, but always from a very, very practical standpoint. We did deaf awareness training last year, so we had specialists in from the deaf community to talk about, you know, you're not going to learn sign language in an hour, but what how how how can you approach dealing with a person with hearing loss? What are the type of things you want to do? What type of interpreters do you need? What type of languages do people speak? So going through the stuff that you know you won't get out of a law textbook, and that's the sort of thing we like to focus on because we feel that you know we are specialists in older and people, and obviously, vulnerability is can be a permanent state, it can be a temporary state, and it's just very straightforward things like if you've got an adult child who's come to see you because their mother has had a catastrophic stroke. Obviously, the mother is vulnerable, they've had a stroke, they may have diminished capacity or lost capacity, but you also have to remember that the adult child who's come in to see you is also vulnerable because their mother is in a terrific state, they're having to make lots of huge, potentially life-changing decisions. They've got the doctors talking to them, the finance people, possibly care issues. You've got so much stuff coming at you, and this is your your mother who is now not the person she she was the day before, and you've got so much stuff coming at you that makes you vulnerable. So it's looking at looking at not only the client but whoever is there advocating for them to say, Well, actually, there's a whole other skill set there. How do I lessen that burden of responsibility? How do I make that person feel safe with me so that we can talk about the issues that they need to deal with and that I can help them through it? These are all huge skills that you don't get taught when you go to law school. And doctors will say the same thing. They don't get, they get if they're lucky, they get half a day on patient dealing with patients, and yeah, this is exactly the same thing, and we're very, very proud that we have focused on that from day one. We've got an externally accredited qualification. And I've been going to Legal Tech Talk now. From this is my third year, I'll be going, and they keep talking about AI, and I'm sure we'll come on to AI later, but they said, you know, but AI is one thing, but it's the human skills that are really count. And I thought, phew, thank goodness for that, because that's what we've been teaching and supporting our members with since from day one. So I think, yes, we're we're finally people think, yes, this is a really, really important side of the job. We're finally getting recognition before the machines take over.

SPEAKER_02 17:26

I have a similar kind of debate and discussion with our family lawyers on the Today's Family Lawyer podcast, our sister publication. And it it's that fine line between being able to advocate for your clients, being able to represent your clients, but not becoming so engrossed in who they are and their challenges that you know you you become almost blindsided by it. It's a really difficult line to tread, I think. And I think private client lawyers are in the same boat in the sense that you know you have to be able to understand and see some of these challenges and account for them, but at the same time, you can't let them kind of dictate the legal side of things, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 18:12

Well, I mean, I had had a conversation with one of our directors this morning, Claire Davis, who is one one of our older solicitors, and she was talking about the fact that her father was a solicitor. So, you know, her father had clients, she had clients, she's got so some of the clients, you know, she helped one of her clients with her the parent, and Claire's been in practice for a long time now. So now this lady is older and needs help. And she said that the lady sees her as part of the family now because Claire and her father have had a relation, a professional relationship for a very, very long time. And in in quite a few cases, particularly in with older people with a bereavement, they are entirely on their own. So their solicitor is the closest, could be the closest thing to family they've got or someone they feel they can talk to. So, yes, it is a very, very fine line. But I find a lot of our members, well, first of all, in our code of practice, it says, you know, if you're dealing with vulnerable people, whereas someone who is quotes unquotes, what is normal, but you know, something you might be able to do with one meeting with someone who's got say full capacity, and we know that's a whole other ball game talking about what capacity is and who's got full capacity, but you might need to spend two, maybe three meetings with someone who has diminished capacity or someone who's very, very stressed to ensure that they're making themselves understood, they've understood what you've said, you're saying, and that the client gets the outcome that's in their best interests, and that all does take time and it does take money because it's ours, and at the end of the day, that's what you're paying for. But people who work who who are members of lifetime lawyers and who specialise in older and vulnerable clients know that know that that's the type of person they deal with, and they have to build that into what they do.

SPEAKER_02 20:01

I think there's a really interesting dynamic that could return to legal, which is almost the return of the family solicitor. And I say that because we've got this very transactional nature of the law at the moment. You think about conveyancing, you know, in and you know, you you go to your conveyancer, you move home, done. You know, I think there's a lot of tr very transactional work that goes on in private clients as well. But what I also see is this growth of the integration of financial services and pensions and other factors into the private client space. We're not just planning for death, we're also planning for life. And that kind of brings with it this opportunity for for lawyers to reassert their credibility, their authority, and reassert that relationship with the client as well. Like I say, there's there's almost like uh I I you know I see that opportunity for for the sector.

SPEAKER_01 21:02

Well, you're opening up one of the biggest cans of worms now. Because I mean, if you in in good old-fashioned marketing terms, you would say in any other industry, here's your client, look at the lifetime value. So, you know, if you retain this client for 30, 40 years, what could you do? So it starts with a will, which is possibly which is very transactional, but they might have a family business, or they may have a divorce, or they may need a family, or they may need this, or they may need that. And you think to yourself, actually, if you if you actually looked at your data and did some cross-selling and some upselling, before you know where you are, you've actually that one client who you know might have just bought a wheel from you potentially is worth a lot more money and can then give you a lot more business. And if you are looking after them in the correct way, they'll probably recommend people. Because you know, if you find a good plumber or a good electrician. Or a good solicitor, you're going to start recommending. But you're up against alley billing and a very transactional view. And I can remember having lots of conversations with the Board of Lifetime Lawyers that there is this thing that you know, this is my client, they're in the commercial team, or this is my client. No, I'm not going to share it. And I remember talking to the wonderful Simon McCrum, and he said, because I was saying, you know, if you're a commercial solicitor and you're dealing with contract law and you're dealing with these very high-powered directors of these large firms, they should all have LPAs in place, they should all have contingency plans in place because it's all very well and good being responsible for a multi-million pound turnover business. But if you have a stroke tomorrow, what is going to happen? Who is going to look after you? Who's going to take care of the business? And you think to yourself, actually, if people were able to open their eyes a little bit more and say, let's look at this as a whole. And it's a bit like medicine in that regard. Actually, you know, if you go in with a cold, have you just got a cold? Have you got something else? What's a headache? Is it a headache or is it start something more serious? You think you need a holistic approach, is what we're talking about. The other thing that I always think about is, you know, you tend to talk to your financial advisor about money stuff, you talk to your solicitor about will stuff, and you talk to your doctor about health stuff, you think actually you want a joined up view, which is what you're talking about, because people will tell you parts of the story. So you'll tell part of the story to your financial advisor, part of the story to your solicitor, part of the story to your doctor, and you think actually, if I'm not saying the doctor needs to be included in your will discussion, but if you were able to tell your whole story to your advisors as a group, you think actually they would spot correlations and things and pick up more interesting things than you're perhaps able to do. Polly Chandler and I have had long discussions about this, and we talk about you know, you probably need a health plan and you need a wealth plan. Now, that doesn't mean to say you've got to be very rich or go to the gym every day, but you've got to think to yourself, I need to look after myself because if I'm now going to live to a hundred, I probably need to think a little bit more about what my quality of life is as I'm growing older. And equally well, with my wealth plan, if I'm going to live to a hundred, what quality of life can I expect? How am I going to fund that? And possibly thinking, well, I'm not sure, even though I've paid my national insurance, that my state pension is going to give me the lifestyle that I want. So, what do I need to put in place now that you know when I hit whatever age I choose to retire? If I choose to retire, I can actually fund my lifestyle. So, yes, having all your advisors talking to each other rather than doing this very transactional approach would be wonderful.

SPEAKER_02 24:47

Which I sense is part of the direction of travel around the name change. So you were solicitors for the elderly, you're now association of lifetime lawyers. I mean, appreciate it's a couple of years ago. Was that kind of part of the thinking behind trying to get the membership community to kind of uh be a bit more more focused on the lifetime value of clients?

SPEAKER_01 25:09

I would like to say yes, but I think I think we might be stretching a little bit. I mean, what we were talking about on the board was supporting people through key aspects of their lifetime, particularly if you're a vulnerable person. Because solicitors for the elderly clearly didn't cut it for many, many reasons. But persuading members to take a less transactional approach is possibly outside our remit. We do talk about it, we do mention it, but at the end of the day, we are there as a training and best practice organization to support members with their skills to help. And we do we do look at marketing and how they can position themselves as thought leaders in their local area. And we do open conversations like you know, your database is a treasure trove, and there's lots of business to be had within existing clients, but we cannot, unfortunately, much as I like to dictate the way that people choose to run their businesses.

SPEAKER_02 26:12

You you said that you have some externally accredited training as well now. I mean, do you regard the association as a consumer brand in the same way that perhaps resolution might like to portray the fact that they have resolution qualified family lawyers?

SPEAKER_01 26:29

Well, I think you're probably asking me what do I think lifetime lines is all about at this point? And to me, it is primarily a family. By that I mean it's a community, it's a supportive and sharing community, and it's a safe space for people to share things with each other. But we've gone on from there, and we also champion the needs of older and vulnerable people. So how I've positioned us, and of course, this is a very nebulous term, isn't it? Because I've positioned us in a certain way, but whether the market has picked up on it is of course a different matter. So we're positioned as the go-to brand for solicitors and qualified lawyers for the public and for the press. So we try to provide top-notch training, and I'll talk about that a bit more. For consumers, we see that if you have the accredited lifetime lawyer logo, so you're an accredited member, an accredited lifetime lawyer, that should be seen as a mark of quality, in our opinion, and that people have particularly done our lifetime care and practice award, and so they know a lot about how to support and value older and vulnerable people. And also, we are now we have positioned ourselves for a while as really the go-to organisation for the press, so that they can come to us to understand new things that happen in the law or things that have been happening in general, and they can come to us for comments. And I am going to blow our trumpet now because for the last six months, in the last six months, that we've had over 160 national press, TV, and radio appearances, which is going some. But in terms of saying, are we a consumer brand? We were not set up as a consumer brand. We have a very powerful search engine on our website so that you can find accredited members near where you live or near where you work. But we are still primarily a training and best practice organisation, but we want consumers to know that we're out there and to turn our brand into household name, we'd meet need many millions, which we don't have. But we we do a lot of work in the press and on social media, and our members work locally and push the fact that they're members. So over time our brand is becoming more known with the consumer. But yeah, we are primarily a membership organization.

SPEAKER_02 28:55

We're fast running out of time for the discussion. Uh, just wanted to kind of pick your brain on what you think the future holds for private clients, what that might mean for the Association of Lifetime Lawyers, and how you might need to adapt going forward. I mean, you know, it it's very difficult at the moment to have any sort of conversation without talking about AI. I'm not necessarily leaning into that. I think there's lots of other changes that are going to happen in the sector. But how do you see kind of things evolving over the next five, ten years?

SPEAKER_01 29:26

Well, I think you know, we have the aging population, which is getting older, and the aging population is getting bigger. So issues are more complex, the law is becoming more complex, but we've always been innovators at lifetime lawyers, and we we try and stay at the cutting edge. So I think the future looks bright for the organization. We are we are focusing our energies as well on students now so that we can encourage the next generation to think that private client is the place to be. And I think it's really important to understand what the next generation demands because it's very different from previous generations. I have two children in their 20s, so I know lots and lots of young people, and it's like a breath of fresh air talking to them about what they want out of life and what they want out of a job. And my my my older son said to me, Mother, I just want to be happy. And I thought, gosh, when I was your age, I just wanted to crack on and become the marketing director as quickly as possible. So I'm thinking, well, that's interesting. So I would say that the younger people demand a better work-life balance, they want more meaningful and fulfilling work, they want different pathways into the profession because not everyone can afford the university route. I also think they can see what's happening to older and vulnerable people in society. They were absolutely reviled by the horrific treatment of older people in lockdown, the fact that they were just herded in care homes and left to die alone, and that really did touch everyone, but it made a huge mark on young people. And I think very optimistically, they want societal change now. They want a fairer, more inclusive society where people can be themselves and other people are not just left to rot. So I think for firms not only to survive but thrive, they have to get with the program now, they have to respond to these demands. And I think really, really exciting things are happening in a lot of firms, and it's quite heartening to see. And also, you know, we can't with all this cost of living crisis, you know, environmental issues have seemed to have gone to the on the back burner, but you know, that's going to come and bite us in the bottom. I mean, look at the weather we've been having recently, you can't ignore that. But I think more firms are looking at environmental concerns now and going for B Corp status. So I think people are actually might be a bit slow to the table, but I think now the take-up is getting better. And I also think Elizabeth Rimmer and her care at law at Law Care are also stirring things up by talking about mental health, by talking about the pressures solicitors find themselves under. And I think, in terms of private clients, you know, in the way back when private client solicitors, they were the privileged few serving the privileged. I think that's all changing now. I think this area is exciting, it really does change quickly. There's enormous challenges, and it does take a very, very special kind of person to work with older and vulnerable people because you need skills that go far beyond the technical. Your client care and communication skills are absolutely paramount now, and they will protect people from being subzoomed into AI. But that doesn't mean to say you shouldn't be paying attention to AI because AI has an awful lot to offer. But you know, we we focus on the personal, caring, and empathetic touch because that's what you need when you're working with the older and vulnerable clients. As I mentioned, we've got a student program now that we're very proud of to encourage the next generation into private client. We're also innovating and we're bringing out a brand new qualification towards the end of the year, which I can't tell you what it is at the moment, but it's going to take the uh the industry by storm. And I think one of the most important things is that people need to not be afraid of AI. And we we we've got an AI subgroup as we like to call it. So we've got board members and my team working on our subgroup to look at AI and to look at how we can support our members. And we've got a big questionnaire that's going out at the moment. We've had quite a few responses in so far, and we we also want to encourage our older members to fill it in because I think there is a slight impression that the AI is for the younger people and they need to kind of figure it all out. Whereas, you know, AI is not going away. One person's response to our questionnaire was when can I retire? Because they find it very frightening. And you know, you've just had that case with Pinsons where they refer themselves to the solicitor regulation authority because young lawyers did whatever they did on AI and the AI hallucinated cases. And you think to yourself, well, that sets us back a little bit, really, in the profession now, because people should have an AI policy in place. People should be saying, okay, check your sources. If it comes up with a case name, where's the source? Can you see it on a case management system? Where's the source? Is it actually true? And things like that. One of the things that also came up on our on our survey was that people in a more senior role think that AI is going to increase their workload now because now they're going to have to check the juniors' work to make sure that they haven't just left AI to do all the work themselves. So there's all sorts of misconceptions and preconceptions out there. So, yes, lifetime lawyers is working away in the background to develop training, policy, and support for people who are members because we have great big firms who've got lovely, expensive external consultants helping them do all sorts of things, down to high street, small high street firms and one-man bands. So we've got to make sure that our smaller members can also use the power of AI to their advantage. So we we we're trying our best to stay current and move things forward.

SPEAKER_02 35:32

Fantastic. And just before we finish, I can't let you go without telling me about the Twilight Awards, because you're launching for the very first time a set of awards for your members, aren't you? And uh coming up in November, and it's going to be a a recognition of the you know what the members do for their clients.

SPEAKER_01 35:54

Absolutely. Well, it's been a very, very long time in the making as Twilight Awards, because it was originally due to launch in 2020. We wonder why it didn't. Yes, so 2020 is the land that time forgot, would like to forget. It did change the world forever. So I well and truly put it on the shelf and thought that was a great idea that never happened. And then we when we realized that 2026 was going to be our 30-year anniversary, we dusted it down and thought maybe, maybe this is the time if it's going to happen. So it's a huge celebration of our 30 years, and we thought, what better way to do that than by celebrating our members? Because I maintain that lifetime lawyers really are unsung heroes because they're there working hard behind the scenes, safeguarding and advocating them for the most vulnerable in society, and they're not recognised for that, and that's what they do. So, as you know, David, I like to do things differently. So we're not doing a lunch and we're not doing a dinner, we're doing an in-between. So we're going to do a champagne reception and afternoon tea, and we're doing it at in Marble Arch at the Victory Services Club. Now, that's a very special organisation as well, because it is a membership organisation. It's a membership organisation for veterans, of which they have about 60,000. So, and some of those are now older and vulnerable as well. So we feel lots of links and synergies there, and they've got a beautiful building. And to liven things up, we have managed to secure Mike Bushel, who is the BBC sports presenter, who is a great fun and very lively, and a very warm, lovely man. So I think it's going to be a great occasion, and it's on the 12th of November. So if people want to come along, it's twilightawards.co.uk and grab your tickets.

SPEAKER_02 37:45

Fabulous. Well, it's been fab to have you on the conversation Lakshmi. We've gone off in all sorts of different directions, some of which, most of which, hasn't been scripted at all. So it's been really interesting to get your thoughts as well on the future of private clients. So thank you very much indeed for joining. Thank you. The Today's Wills and Probate podcast is available on your preferred podcast provider. It's also available on today's wills and probate.co.uk. My thanks to Laxme. Thank you as ever for listening, and we'll see you again soon.