TradeNames: A country solicitor who came to Dublin in the 1950s now has a series of offices in what were once villages but are now busy suburbs, writes Rose Doyle

Dank and dimly lit, crammed to their 40 watt bulbs with yellowed files hunched over by yellowed workers, solicitors offices were long the stuff of literary imaginations. All changed, even as the work and humanity remains essentially the same as clients with issues, needs and injustices arrive daily to seek resolution in law.

Seán OCeallaigh, solicitor, has seen more than your average amount of change in the business: more than half a century of it in fact. He became a solicitor in 1954, set up his own company in 1958 near Doyle's Corner, Phibsborough, Dublin 7, has seen the nation and Seán OCeallaigh & Co Solicitors grow ever since. He has also, in a 21st century Ireland, seen some things come full circle.

Born in Bandon, Co Cork, he grew up in Mallow and was apprenticed in his teens to a solicitor uncle, Martin Kelly in Kilkenny. He tells his story with attention to detail, and humour. He remembers coming to Dublin's Kilmainham Court by train, working his court case, getting a 1pm train home and finishing a day's work in the office. All for £3 per day. His father was a Garda sergeant, his mother was Mary Josephine Phelan from Bandon, whose father "was a representative for the Imperial Tobacco Co".

His son Ruairí, a partner in the firm, sits in to give his side of things and solicitor Graham Jones, fascinated by the story of the firm he works for, adds to and refreshes memories as we go along. We're in 363 North Circular Road, premises the firm moved into just 10 years ago. The walls hang with nostalgic Victorian prints, the furniture is dark and shining, the light bright and cheerful. Not a shade of yellow, anywhere.

"My uncle," Seán goes on, "finished up as county registrar in Carlow and I took over the office in Kilkenny. After a few years I came to Dublin and started up on my own at 393 North Circular Road, just down the road from here. I'd no staff," he grins, "just myself and my guardian angel. I'd no phone and had to go across the road to take calls.

"There was a piano in the room with me and my filing system was a cardboard box divided into six compartments. I was the only solicitor around and had my lodgings in a room behind the office. A Mrs Reid, my landlady and the owner of the house, gave me breakfast and even acted as receptionist for a while. She was a great character."

Family contacts and his own energy helped build the company. "West of Ireland relatives of my father living in Dublin and colleagues of his in the Garda were my two main collections of customers," he says, "plus I joined the Eblana Toastmasters club and made contacts there.

"It was very quiet around here then. These offices used be a chemist shop. The State and Bohemian cinemas were going then and cattle used pass by outside, going from the market at Hanlon's Corner - there's an apartment block there now - to the docks. They were afraid of the traffic lights so these were turned off for the 20 minutes or so it took them to pass."

There were no restaurants or "eating places, except for Murphys, now the Bohemian. One day a client told me she'd heard a woman on the bus, when it was passing the office, saying that there was a great solicitor in there, that he'd take on anything and not let it go, was like a dog with a bone! I was very encouraged by that!"

After a while he opened a branch office in Clondalkin.

"It was a real country village then. I rented a room for two hours on Tuesday nights and used go there on the bus. That was the time of the Working Man's Compensation Act, mostly for people injured working in agriculture, but there were personal injury cases against Clondalkin Paper Mills too, and against Guinness."

In 1962 he met Pauline Cannon in the Olympia Ballroom. It was, he admits, "love at first sight. She'd worked as a shorthand typist for president Séan T Ó Ceallaigh and for Guinness after that. She had 120 words a minute in Irish." They had nine children together, four of whom are "involved in law".

In 1968 he opened a branch office in Finglas. "I used go there every afternoon. I'd an assistant solicitor by that time and he'd look after North Circular Road. Finglas was very quiet then too, only a few shops in the village. I mostly got accident cases from Unidare; protective clothing wasn't in vogue and I had a few big High Court cases."

One of these - a case in which a man died six months after an accident in Co Clare - set a precedent in the common law position in terms of liability for personal injuries and the nexus between causes of death, and death. "The late John Kelly, of Fine Gael, was my junior counsel at the time and gave a masterly address to the jury, convincing the court that, though the man didn't die immediately, he did die as a result of the accident."

Ruairí OCeallaigh became a solicitor in 2000, joined the firm and looks after the Phibsborough office. Cormac OCeallaigh qualified and joined up in 2001 and looks after the Ashford, Co Wicklow branch. The brothers are partners in the firm. Graham Jones came on board after UCD and a stint with solicitors McCann FitzGerald and looks after the Dundrum office.

Seán keeps a consulting eye on "these lads. I would consider myself far less qualified than they are - they've studied far more subjects: employment law, family law, trust law, European law. And they can specialise."

Graham Jones is having none of this humility. "Seán's much more educated than any of us. There's his experience - and he speaks 10 languages."

Which leads to another aspect of Seán OCeallaigh's well-lived life; his adventures in language learning, the way he taught himself French and Spanish while still at school, the letters he wrote to the French ambassador in Dublin and the de la Salle brothers in Valladolid, Spain.

Languages and the law. In the "tough" 1970s and 1980s there was always work in conveyancing, wills, estates. In the 1970s Seán became a director of the Family Building Society and the firm handled all its work before being bought by the EBS.

These days, the partner brothers and Graham Jones apart, the firm employs six people with Seán's first-born, Róisín, as the company's accountant and son Aodhagan, a court clerk, doing all the out-of-office work. "We've the best staff you could have," Seán says.

"We're part of a changing culture," Ruairí points out. "Many of our clients are new-Irish buying houses, mostly from Africa and Eastern Europe. About 15 per cent of our clients would be new-Irish." Graham Jones says a lot of their clients "are buying second homes, which means they're really establishing themselves here. They work hard to get established - one client had three jobs to save the house deposit."

And so we come full circle. "Personal injury," Graham points out, "has always been a mainstay of solicitors' practices and still is - but the kind of case is changing. When Seán started it was working man's compensation cases but now they're nearly all service industry cases. It shows how we've moved from an agriculture-based economy to a service-based one. When Seán started here there were cattle passing in the road outside. Now it's full of SUVs, once used for cattle herding but now for city driving!"

For the future, all agree the firm will go on. They agree too that smaller solicitors' firms will consolidate, "come together to get a share of the market". Seán OCeallaigh & Co is, Graham says, "more likely to build on Seán's shoulders and get bigger and stay local by opening more local offices. We won't be changing our ethos, however, which is that service to the customer is all."