Profile - Peter Smart: From the rock'n'roll lifestyle to the serious business of success

The end of the season was approaching and some friends from England were driving south through Europe for a visit. On arrival, one of the friends passed on a message from his mother: "She sends her love and wants to know when you are going to come home and grow up?"

It was a reasonable question to ask. Mr Smart, then in his early 20s, had not exactly been in a rush to embrace the grown-up world of work and responsibility.

He had been on the receiving end of an "excellent" education, he said, but found more distractions than he ought in "long hair, hippies and all that sort of stuff".

Watching TV footage of man landing on the Moon, he had thought to himself, "why do I need to work when there are all these wonderful things happening in the world?"

So rather than getting stuck into boring things like office jobs, Mr Smart went to rock festivals, got a window-cleaning round and travelled to India, although he never actually arrived – instead, he spent three months living in a cave in Greece.

He found well-paid work as a kind of roadie, working for a small lighting crew called Extra Sensory Projections, which hired itself out to bands. He toured with Curved Air, The Rolling Stones and Joni Mitchell, getting 50 a week, then a handsome sum.

But here he was in Greece, facing what looked like an ultimatum from his mother, a lawyer. "I thought okay, fine – I might as well go home," he said. So off he went, getting a lift back to the UK with his friends, after a three-day party on a millionaire's yacht, of course.

Back in the UK, the group headed north on the M1, bound for Leeds and then Liverpool. Mr Smart got out in Leeds. He found a place at Leeds Polytechnic Law School. He met his future wife, a nurse called Glenys.

They got on famously and married nine months later. He graduated and took his Law Society exams.

The days of messing around were over. Ambition reared its head. Mr Smart was offered a job at Walker Morris & Coles. West Yorkshire was going through a process of change. Leeds and Bradford had been through the pain wrought by the collapse of the textiles industry. The manufacturing and service industries were on the rise. The changing landscape created opportunities for thrusting young lawyers.

"There were three or four pre-eminent, very long-standing, highly-regarded practices such as Simpson Curtis, Booth and Co and Hepworth and Chadwick. They were very well connected firms and dominated the commercial scene and everybody else was a bit player," he said.

"There were a few firms around that decided they were going to challenge the trio of established firms and break up the cosy cartel and, I think, did it very successfully."

On qualifying, in 1979, his senior partner asked him: "Smarty, what do you want to do? The world's going to become much more specialist. You should either be a corporate lawyer or a commercial litigator because you can be a bit abrasive at times."

He did both for a year, became a partner and decided to build a corporate practice at Walker Morris. The firm grew and allowed him the chance to develop with it. Rather than adopting the strategy of opening offices everywhere, like some regional law firms, Walker Morris focused on providing its services from one office.

It proved a success, with the firm now established as a leading member of the dominant Big Six in Yorkshire. Walker Morris also claims to be one of the most profitable law firms outside of the Magic Circle in the City.

Mr Smart has been executive chairman for the last nine years and previously held the roles of managing partner, finance partner and marketing partner, while heading corporate.

"Of all those roles, the most interesting one was finance partner, because you learn an awful lot about how all the different parts of the business tick, and what you find is that they don't all tick in the same way. Understanding that is a very good platform for understanding how the whole practice fits together."

"The legal profession is a very simple business. You've got to get the work, you've got to do the work, you've got to bill it and then you've got to collect it. If you abide by all those things, you'll have a healthy business."

Walker Morris's business philosophy is to give creative people the space to make their own decisions, within broad parameters, said Mr Smart. He describes himself as an analyser.

"To be a good lawyer, you need to be a good analyser. You need to deconstruct a factual matrix in order to answer the question that is being put to you. Sometimes, you need to deconstruct it so as to understand the question your client is asking is the wrong one.

"It's often the case that the client doesn't know the right question to ask you. The client probably does know what his problem is, but isn't always very good at articulating it and presumptuously tells you what the question is, rather than telling you the factual matrix first.

"What you should be doing is exploring that factual matrix in order to understand what the real problem is, or what the real question is, in order to find the real solution to his problem.

"A good lawyer does that. A bad lawyer says 'the answer to the question you put to me is this', whether it helps the client one jot is irrelevant. It's partly client service, but it is also having an intellectual fascination with arguments and how to construct them. I don't think I went into the law because I am an analyser, but I became a half-decent lawyer and enjoyed it because I was."

Mr Smart, who was born in Lambeth, South London, and raised in Hertfordshire, has spent most of his professional life in Leeds and has advised many successful Yorkshire businesses.

"Yorkshire businesses, to be blunt, are not fundamentally different from others. But Yorkshiremen tend to be transparent and tell you what they think.

"As a general rule in business, that's helpful. Definitely, Londoners are not as open and, from a professional's point of view, you have to skirt around a bit and work out where they are coming from, whereas the true Yorkshireman tells you where he's coming from; you don't have to try to work it out yourself."

Good business people share common characteristics, said Mr Smart. These are clarity of vision, clarity of thought and clarity of communication. They are good with people and do not bark or shout.

Turning 60 this year, Mr Smart looks back over his career. He does not pause when asked what sacrifices he made in his life.

"My family, but I have tried to catch up on that. When I was young, and I think this is true of all aspiring professionals, you can get a bit single-minded, you can get a bit too focused on your career and your business and sadly you don't see it at the time, but your family come second.

"The business was everything and I paid lip service to being

a father and a husband. But when the kids got in their

teens and I became a little less intense, I think we have made up for it."

PETER SMART

Title: Chairman, Walker Morris

Date of birth: September 5, 1950

Education: BA (Hons)

First job: Lighting for rock bands

Favourite holiday destination: Anywhere exotic that the wife takes me, particularly India

Last book read: The Lion Man by Ian McGeechan

Car driven: Porsche Carrera 4S

Favourite film: Zulu (visited Rorke's Drift this year)