Robert Pirrie is a British lawyer qualified in Scotland. He built a career in corporate and commercial law with several Scottish firms before becoming chief executive of the Society of Writers to His Majesty's Signet (WS Society) in 2005. He later completed doctoral research in history on North Britain, 1746–1830.
Background
Robert Pirrie was born in February 1957. His professional life unfolded within Scotland's distinct legal system, which the 1707 Act of Union specifically preserved when Scotland joined the United Kingdom.
Scottish solicitors were traditionally known as writers, and the Writers to the Signet were among the solicitors entitled to supervise use of the King's Signet, the private seal of early Scottish kings. He qualified within this tradition and later led the society that traces its origins to it.
Education
Pirrie studied law at the University of Glasgow, where he took an honours Bachelor of Laws with first-class honours. Founded in 1451, the university is one of Scotland's oldest.
He then studied at the law school of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver in 1980. UBC, a public research university in the Canadian province of British Columbia, was established in 1908.
Pirrie later completed a Master of Arts in Urban History with distinction at the Open University, a distance-learning institution founded in the United Kingdom in 1969. The award is dated 15 May 2019.
His doctoral thesis, Imagined Monarchy: Constructing North Britain, 1746–1830, was submitted at King's College London, a constituent college of the University of London founded in 1829. The period it covers begins in the aftermath of the 1745–46 Jacobite rising and extends into the early nineteenth century.
Career
Pirrie served an apprenticeship as a solicitor from 1978 to 1980. He qualified as a solicitor in Scotland in 1981 and worked as a solicitor with Moncrieff Warren Paterson in Glasgow until 1984. Scottish solicitors had long been called writers, so his entry into the profession placed him within a long-established legal tradition.
In 1984 he joined Maclay Murray & Spens, a firm founded in Glasgow in 1871 as the first law firm in Scotland with a specifically commercial practice. He worked there as a solicitor in Glasgow until 1985 and then became a partner in the firm's Edinburgh office, a post he held until 1997. The firm later combined with the international firm Dentons, a process completed in 2017.
In 1997 Pirrie became a partner at Dundas & Wilson, a firm with offices in Edinburgh, Glasgow and London that had formerly been part of Andersen Legal. He held the roles of head of private equity and head of corporate and commercial work there. The firm is now part of CMS.
From 2002 to 2005 he undertook consultancy work, including tutoring and coaching in legal practice. In 2005 he became chief executive of the Society of Writers to His Majesty's Signet, known as the WS Society. The society is among the oldest professional bodies in the world, and as chief executive he has also acted as the Society's in-house lawyer.
Pirrie later reflected that leaving legal practice as a corporate lawyer to become chief executive of the WS Society marked the start of a second career as a historian.
Membership
Pirrie was admitted as a Writer to the Signet in 1985. The Society of Writers to His Majesty's Signet, whose members are Scottish solicitors, was established in 1594, when the King's Secretary, as Keeper of the Signet, gave commissions to a Deputy Keeper and eighteen other writers. The Writers to the Signet were included in the College of Justice in 1532, alongside the Faculty of Advocates and the clerks of the Court of Session.
The Society's historic privileges included freedom from certain taxes in Edinburgh, exemption from military duty, and rights of audience before the College of Justice. Today the Society is an independent membership body of Scottish solicitors, and its members use the postnominal letters WS.
