Some people stay in a job for a few years. Others manage a decade. Gordon Sommerville walked into Pomphreys in 1977 and stayed for forty-nine of them.

In that time he has acted for three generations of the same Wishaw families. He has watched the fax machine arrive, take over and then vanish again. He opened an office in Hamilton and later closed it. Along the way he moved the firm across town, merged in another practice, and eventually handed the whole business on. On 30 September he finishes as a consultant and retires properly.

So, before he goes, we asked him about all of it.

Law was never the plan. At school he had his heart set on management. That came largely from summer jobs at a local motor dealership, where he worked as a shunt driver and watched the salesmen at close quarters.

That was what he was told at the time. To a degree, he reckons, it was fair comment.

His headmaster took a different view. A law degree would be more stable, he argued, and it would open doors well beyond private practice. So Gordon went to Dundee University, and from there to Miller Brownlee Watson and Beckett in Glasgow for his apprenticeship.

There he met the man he still credits. John McKinlay was a conveyancer of real quality, and, importantly, he took the time to teach properly.

Pomphreys dates back to 1897, and the firm stayed in the founding family for three generations. Gordon knew the last two of them well.

By the mid-1970s, William Pomphrey was into his eighties and looking to retire. His son Gavin was already in the business and needed help. Gordon had expected to stay in the city. Someone persuaded him otherwise, and in 1977 he joined the firm at its old Belhaven Terrace premises.

Robert Allan followed him in as a trainee about three years later. Nearly half a century on, the two of them are still in the same building.

When Gavin Pomphrey retired, none of his sons had gone into law. So, the firm passed instead to Gordon along with Robert Allan and Iain Wilson as partners.

In the 1980s the estate agency business in Lanarkshire ran through Hamilton. The agents there would only deal with solicitors who had a Hamilton address. Wishaw, as Gordon puts it, may as well have been the other side of the moon. So, in 1989 he and Robert Allan opened an office in the town.

It worked. Even so, the Hamilton market was saturated with solicitors and estate agents, and it was relentlessly price driven.

Wishaw turned out to be a different proposition entirely. Here the work came through families rather than quotes, and it kept coming back.

By 2000 Gordon had moved the Wishaw office up to Kenilworth Avenue. Around 2005 the firm added premises in Hill Street and brought the Hamilton staff north. Remarkably, not one member of the team was lost along the way. Clients followed too, because parking in Wishaw was easier and it cost them nothing. Then in 2008 the sole practitioner Hugh Gilchrist merged his practice into the firm. Pomphreys kept his client connection long after he retired.

That same year brought the one real shock of Gordon’s career. It was not the closure of Ravenscraig, he is quick to say. That came before his time in the town.

Naturally, the tools have changed beyond recognition. Gordon still enjoys the memory of the office’s first fax machine. The reaction from other solicitors at the time was less than enthusiastic.

Electric typewriters got a similar reception. Yet the deeper change, he thinks, is not the technology itself but the tempo it created.
In the early days everything went out by letter, and you waited for a reply before doing anything else. Now a client sends an email and expects an answer the same day. That is more pressure, certainly, although he has no patience with the idea of resisting it.

After the move back to Wishaw in 2000, Gordon handed the commercial and residential conveyancing to Robert Allan and concentrated on private client work. That meant Wills, Powers of Attorney, executries and trusts. It also meant sitting with people on some of the worst days of their lives.

His measure of whether a meeting has gone well is disarmingly simple.

He also became a director of a trustee service based at Eurocentral, setting up discretionary trusts for families with a disabled or vulnerable relative. That directorship has since passed to Sarah Lynch. Meanwhile, the ordinary appointments taught him to listen for what was not being asked.

Ask him what causes families the most avoidable trouble, and the answer comes back immediately. People put off making a Power of Attorney.

The reason this matters so much is what happens next. A Power of Attorney is comparatively straightforward and inexpensive. Once capacity is gone, however, it is no longer an option. The family must then apply to the sheriff court for a guardianship order under the Adults with Incapacity (Scotland) Act 2000 instead. That process is slower, costlier and considerably more stressful. The numbers also show how many families end up there. In its 2024 to 2025 monitoring report, the Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland recorded 20,152 people subject to welfare guardianship. A further 4,300 new orders were granted in that single year.

There is a second, related misunderstanding that Gordon meets constantly.

In fact, the two documents do entirely different jobs. Your Power of Attorney operates during your lifetime and stops at the moment of death. Your Will takes effect from that moment onwards. You need both, and you need the Will reviewed every four or five years rather than filed away and forgotten.

For anyone who doubts it, Gordon has seen where the alternative leads. Twice he has wound up estates worth millions of pounds where the person had left no Will at all. In both cases there was no immediate family, so nobody had ever pushed the point. Where there is no Will, the rules of intestacy decide who inherits, and the answer is often a surprise. One of those estates needed a genealogist to trace a raft of cousins the deceased had barely known. Part of it also sat in Gibraltar, which meant instructing lawyers there too.

Gordon spent years in partnership before becoming sole owner, and rather to his surprise he preferred going it alone.

Approaching his mid-sixties, though, he started thinking about what came next. Someone suggested a merger, and he rejected it quickly. After so long running his own show, he had no appetite for answering to anyone else. Instead, he decided to look at what else was out there.

What happened next was, by his own account, a piece of luck. Sarah Lynch came in for an interview, and her CV included HR experience the firm had never had.

The clients and the staff, easily.

Some of them travel a long way for the privilege. Over the years Gordon Sommerville has had clients driving in from Helensburgh and Edinburgh, simply because of the connection.

The compliance paperwork is another matter entirely.

Asked what makes a good solicitor, beyond knowing the law, he does not hesitate. Listen, and talk to people on their own level. Don’t speak down to anyone. His advice to a newly qualified solicitor on their first day runs along the same lines.

That instinct has shaped the firm. Several members of staff have been at Pomphreys for twenty-five or thirty years. In any high street practice, that is remarkable.

Retirement itself means walking holidays. There is also a fortnight in Dubai in October visiting his youngest son, then a return trip over Christmas and New Year.

Asked finally to sum up what the firm has meant to him, he took a moment.

Gordon Sommerville’s career explains a good deal about how this firm works. The firm has been advising families in Wishaw and across North Lanarkshire since 1897. Throughout that time, the same instincts have carried through.

You will deal with people who stay. Our solicitors and paralegals tend to measure their service in decades rather than years. The person who helped you buy your first house may well help your daughter buy hers.

You will get plain speaking. Listening properly and explaining things without jargon is not a slogan here. It is simply the habit the firm was built on.

You will get the full picture. The same team handles conveyancing, Wills, Powers of Attorney, executries and family law. So, the conversation you came in for often turns up something else worth sorting while you are here.

And the work continues. Sarah Lynch, Robert Allan, Iain Wilson and Joe Rowan are all here for your ongoing matters. Behind them sits an experienced private client, family law and conveyancing team.

If Gordon’s forty-nine years have produced one piece of practical advice, it is this. Do not wait.

A Power of Attorney takes one conversation and a signing appointment. After that it sits quietly until the day it is needed. A Will does much the same job for the people you leave behind. Both are far easier to arrange now than to fix later. Registration with the Office of the Public Guardian also takes time of its own, so early really is better than late.

If you would like to talk it through, our private client team will be glad to help. Call us on 01698 373365, email sl@pomphreyslaw.com, or drop into the office at 1 Kenilworth Avenue. There is no charge for an initial chat about what you need.

Yes, but only in limited circumstances. For unfair dismissal and most Employment Rights Act 1996 claims, the tribunal asks whether it was reasonably practicable to lodge in time. Discrimination claims under the Equality Act 2010 use a broader just and equitable test. Either way the extension is discretionary, and it is refused more often than it is granted.

Not for the claims listed in the agreement, which is precisely what your employer is paying for. You keep the right to enforce the agreement itself, and standard carve-outs preserve accrued pension rights and personal injury claims you did not know about when you signed. No agreement can prevent you making a protected disclosure. This is why the advice you receive beforehand matters so much, because once the document is signed there is generally no way back.

Yes, in almost all cases. You must notify ACAS and obtain an early conciliation certificate before a tribunal will accept your claim. Taking part in the conciliation itself is voluntary and you can decline it. Since 1 December 2025 the conciliation period can run for up to twelve weeks, and your time limit is paused throughout, provided you notified ACAS within the original deadline.

Sarah Lynch is the Managing Partner at Pomphreys. Sarah studied at Dundee University, achieving a 2:1 LLB Honours degree in Scots Law. She then moved back to Glasgow to study the Diploma in Legal Practice, being one of only a small number of students to be offered a funded position for academic excellence achieved during the LLB. Sarah then secured a traineeship concentrating on Personal Injury before deciding to broaden her scope of work to all civil litigation. We recently caught up with Sarah to discuss her role in Pomphreys.

Tel: 01698 373 365

Email: sl@pomphreyslaw.com

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