Even a high-flyer can gain from leadership training, Kate Marshall writes.

Peter Carter calls lawyers such as himself “the last line of defence for the public”.

The managing partner of Carter Capner, the plaintiff law firm he took over from his father, Ted, Carter is known for championing workers’ compensation and tort reform, as well as specialising in commercial and competition law.

Carter became a joint founder of the Queensland branch of the Australian Lawyers Alliance in 1994.

As a foundation member of the Queensland Workers’ Rights Coalition, he has a successful track record of taking on government and big business to stand up for individual rights.

Two examples of this include helping to defeat the Goss Labor government’s proposals to abolish common law workplace injury claims in 1994 and leading resistance to the Borbidge coalition government’s plan to introduce a bodily impairment threshold the following year.

Carter grew up in Brisbane and, like his three brothers, followed his father into the law.

Fresh from school in Toowoomba, he enrolled in arts/law but after a year at the University of Queensland, the wider world beckoned and he left for two years of overseas travel.

He ended up working as a construction labourer in Namibia in a town close to the Angolan border. He took flying lessons and experienced the horrors of civil war as refugees flooded over the border.

The flying lessons stood him in good stead – Carter is possibly one of only a few lawyers to specialise in aviation law and fly a Piper Cherokee.

He eventually returned home and graduated in 1980, adding a postgraduate degree in civil law some years later.

But it wasn’t until times started getting tough for law firms specialising in litigation that Carter considered another bit at university. Choosing to do the executive leadership program (ELP) at UQ was partly driven by loyalty to his alma mater, he says.

“It’s an excellent mix of theory, exercises and workshops,” he says.

But the more important factor was being forced to diversity into other areas of law to ensure his firm’s survival as tort law changes began to bite in 2003.

Carter says he rues the day the “three amigos” – John Howard, Bob Carr and NSW supreme court judge David Ipp – pushed through tort law reform.

“It’d seen this stuff about leadership come across my desk, but the trampling of consumer rights has really affected lawyers like us,” Carter says.

“It’s forced us to cut down our public advocacy and pro bono work; now it’s more a matter of ‘all hands to the grindstone’.”

Carter says his biggest single discovery from the leadership program is that “it brought the authentic me to the table”.

“I guess you could say I was a reluctant leader but I’ve definitely grown into the role since doing the ELP. It’s taught me that I should lead the firm the way I think it should be led, rather than in the way other people think it should be done.

“The decision on leadership style has to come from within; you can’t be a fake leader.”