Ann had, unusually, re-qualified as a solicitor after previous careers as a theatre nurse and transatlantic flight attendant with the support of her husband Joe McCarthy, who had qualified in 1969.

Their other sons John and Joseph now work at the firm, while the youngest, Paul, is training as a solicitor.

However, while Mr McCarthy’s career appears to have been mapped out with some deliberation, and he concedes that the family story is very distinctive, he says that his decision to be a lawyer was almost a whimsical one.

“It was never something I felt destined for,” he says. “I really had no clear idea of what direction to take after the leaving certificate back in 1990 and my father said to me, ‘well the law isn’t a bad choice — why don’t you give that a go?’. So here I am, 30 years later, still doing it.”

After that initial decision, 25 of these years have been spent with the family firm, which has grown aggressively to become an organisation that employs 20 people and specialises in personal injury and medical negligence cases.

In March its staff were joined by Tánaiste Micheál Martin for the opening of the firm’s new offices at the West Cork Technology Park near Clonakilty.

“While we specialise in medical negligence and personal injury, which is 85 percent of the firm’s business, we also have a conveyancing, property and probate department that serves our clients. Our business is now very much nationwide, from Donegal to Dublin,” says Mr McCarthy, who is also an author, speaker and an acknowledged expert in client service, innovation.

This has been a significant year for McCarthy + Co, which last month won Law Firm of the Year at the Dye & Durham Irish Law Awards 2024. “Receiving that was really very gratifying and we were frankly quite humbled to win the award, considering some of the past recipients and the fact that we were up against some of the largest and most reputable law firms in the country,” he says.

It was recognition of a firm in a small town in Co Cork that had reinvented itself and adapted by moving swiftly and innovatively when circumstances were challenging, Mr McCarthy explains.

“After my BCL at University College Cork and Master’s in commercial law at UCD I did my traineeship — or apprenticeship, as it was then called — with Michael O’Shaughnessy at Patrick F O’Reilly in Dublin,” he recalls.

“Among their other clients, they were the solicitors for Temple Bar Properties in the early kind of phase of the Celtic Tiger boom which was a very exciting period.

“However, I always wanted to come back to west Cork and when I joined my mother in 2000, it was joining a small practice with a turnover that was less than my salary in Dublin.

“Thankfully, the business grew very successfully year on year until we saw double digit growth and continued to grow when my brother, joined us in 2004.”

However, in 2008-2009 Mr McCarthy was forced to concede that it hadn’t only been his business acumen that had led to that: “We had also been working in the bubble of the Celtic Tiger — which suddenly collapsed.”

There followed, he says, several extremely difficult years and a period during which the firm had to radically rethink its business model. “Until then we had been very much a rural, general practice, depending on our local client base in a relatively small town as our exclusive source of business,” says Mr McCarthy.

“We decided that we had to go online which we began to do in the early 2010s, developing the business model that we have now through launching mccarthy.ie and, initially making a virtue of necessity, we started developing that brand nationwide.”

It was a pivotal decision that was to give the firm an important head start, meaning that it was dealing with clients online long before Covid occurred, with its accompanying remote consultations and the widespread use of Teams and Zoom.

“Suddenly people began to say: hold on, this is a much more convenient way of dealing with a lawyer,” he says. “I can speak with them over the phone. We can arrange a consultation over Zoom so that I don’t have to take time off work to travel to their office and don’t have to get somebody to look after the kids — and that convenience factor was how the business model evolved.”

Now some 95 per cent of clients never set foot in McCarthy and Co’s offices. “We do though meet them sometimes during initial consultations, maybe in the in the Four Courts, or at other court venues,” he adds.

The experience proved an informative and, when it involved the wider business community, an inclusive one. “It basically forced me to go out to learn about marketing and the fundamentals of how to develop and grow a business and how to apply that to a legal firm,” Mr McCarthy says.

The profession, he suggests, can sometimes feel like that it’s almost exempt from the rules of business — something that led him to become involved in the Chamber of Commerce and fostered a desire to an immersive experience in business communities and networks — and to collaborative working.

“I’ve become very passionate about the whole idea of developing and growing skills and knowledge. And a serendipitous offshoot of that was launching the webinars that my colleague Martin Lawlor at Coghlan Kelly Solicitors and I started running during the pandemic.

“By the end of the first year, we had 1,000 people on these webinars and they became an unexpected phenomenon which led to our establishing the community that’s called the Solicitors Growth Network and has been running since 2021.

“It’s now a thriving community of colleagues who come together to learn, grow and develop their professional skills but more importantly, to support one another and to share ideas,” he says.

Despite having boarded at Castleknock College in Dublin, where rugby is the flagship sport, he describes himself as a “sunny day” rugby supporter and is much more enthused by Cork having reached the all-Ireland hurling final with Clare, taking place on Sunday.

With five children of whom he is obviously proud, Mr McCarthy is married to Mags, from Ballycastle in Co Antrim, who is the also firm’s financial controller — but he’s keen to stress that the ‘family’ extends beyond those with the firm’s eponymous surname.

“We regard all the people working here as part of the family — and also look on our clients as part of that wider McCarthy + Co family,” he says.

“We have some very ambitious goals for the future and it’s great to lead a team who are all very passionate about helping our clients to achieve the outcomes that they want.”