Profile
Suzanne Rice Senior Vice President of the Law Society of Northern Ireland Suzanne Rice
S
uzanne Rice is the Senior Vice President of the Law Society of Northern Ireland. Suzanne is a specialist family law solicitor at McKeown & Co Solicitors and reflects on her career and roles at The Law Society with Bhini Phagura. When did you decide to become a lawyer and what were your reasons? I decided to look at reading Law when I was preparing for my GCSE exams. I noticed I would instinctively reach for the English literature or history text books to study instead of sciences or maths and coupled with a voracious appetite for reading, as well as being from the generation that read John Grisham novels and watched American legal dramas on television, I soon realised the family tradition of medicine wasn’t for me and my skill set was better suited to a profession where you analysed evidence, recalled facts and could think on your feet. How did you decide to pursue that aim? I grew up in a family where the bookshelves were filled with medical textbooks so my decision to become a lawyer was not influenced by any family traditions and very much saw me setting out on a career pathway with lots of moral support from my family but no family networks or contacts. I spent a few weeks on work experience with both a local Solicitor and a Family Barrister (now one of our first high court female judges) and the experience I gained increased my interest in becoming a lawyer. I had never studied any Law modules before attending university which is why I combined my Law degree with French. I reasoned if I didn’t like the Law, I could always fall back on my French degree. As it happened, the reverse occurred, and by my final year I knew my main interest was in working with my Law degree. When it came to qualifying as a lawyer, I applied for both the solicitor and barrister training course at our Institute of Professional Legal Studies in Belfast. I was accepted onto the solicitor course and placed on the wait list for the Bar. I moved quickly up the wait list and began two weeks of the Bar Course whilst another student was awaiting her final degree classification before going back and joining the Solicitor course.
Two weeks of the Bar course was enough for me to realise a career as a barrister wasn’t for me as I preferred the collegiate setting of an Office and the interaction with the client from start to finish in a case. What was your experience of being a solicitor as a trainee and when qualified? I trained in a small, provincial firm in Lurgan in County Armagh with one Principal Solicitor. Apart from the Principal, there were no other solicitors in the firm but in Lurgan there is a strong network of solicitor colleagues and I had the benefit of meeting up with other trainees from local firms and sharing our experiences during my apprenticeship which was invaluable. Looking back, I loved my time as a trainee as I was very fortunate to have a ‘Master’ who allowed me access to all files and threw me in at the deep end from day one always treating me as an assistant solicitor and never as an apprentice. As a trainee the “hands-on” experience I was given definitely brought a whole new meaning to the term “steep learning curve”. When I qualified, I moved to a firm in Belfast where I was able to develop my career in family law. I really benefited from the collegiate working practice amongst the majority of family solicitors which continues to this day. I recall after my first week in court being invited out for coffee by a group of senior family solicitors and that has always stuck with me as such a kind and thoughtful gesture from older colleagues in the profession and was a great way for me to see there is much more to the profession then simply advising clients on their legal issues. Why did you become involved with your Law Society and how did you and the society benefit from this? It was really my interest in family law and wanting to do more than just practice family law which is why I joined the Law Society. I was interested to know what shaped and developed family law as, at that time, family law was going through a huge change with developments in alternative dispute resolutions and pilot court projects. Continued on next page
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