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I was a reporter covering Canary Wharf when Lehman Brothers folded.

As a journalist, it was one of those days you dream about – the disgruntled workers willing to tell you everything, the imagery of the staff leaving with hastily packed boxes. (We even found out the local strip club had its best ever day’s takings, a nugget of information that almost certainly didn’t find its way into the Financial Times.)

The abiding feeling was one of shock – this gigantic bank, enclosed in a great glass tower, was surely too big to fail, we thought. Even as those gloomy bankers headed through the revolving door for the last time, the question most were asking was, how did a company so big manage to collapse so suddenly?

It was a salutary lesson that nothing is sacred in business. Which is why it was little surprise to me to hear that a good 20% of law firms in serious financial difficulties come from the top 200.

The release of the news appeared inadvertent on the part of the Solicitors Regulation Authority, truth be told. Executive director Samantha Barrass told the board 160 firms were in ‘intensive engagement’ and it was only when a board member let slip the 20% figure that we realised the scale of the issue.

We’re talking around 30 firms with hefty turnovers and presumably a decent number of staff. If even a handful of the intensive engagements turn into interventions, the cost is going to go through the roof.

There is a sense that the SRA is chasing its tail with regard to keeping a lid on financial security of firms (and the subsequent protection of clients).

Earlier in the board meeting, Barrass announced a mass health-check of some 2,000 firms that might be feeling the pinch from legal aid cuts and civil justice reforms. It’s an idea we’ll put in the box marked ‘well-intentioned but ill-conceived’.

There may well be some at-risk patients who want regular contact with their doctor to pick over the bad news, but surely more will want the time and freedom to concentrate on getting better?

These firms are going to be emailed asking for detailed financial information. What the SRA will then do with the info – not to mention how it will find the time and resources to analyse 2,000 responses – is unclear.

The firms in question face an awkward choice: they can respond in full, using precious hours to outline exactly what trouble they’re in and invite a knock on the door from the regulator. Or they can tell the regulator to mind its own and invite the accusation they have something to hide.

I’m sure the SRA wants to do best by solicitors – they’re not the monsters our comments section would have you believe and there are genuinely talented people in charge. If anything, they need more help. The government has pulled the rug out from under solicitors and almost seems to be relishing the chance to kick a few to the kerb.

Now the SRA (and the profession as a whole) is left with the job of propping them up, it’s high time more financial support came to help it carry out the job. They should be banging the door of government to request some leadership and support on this issue.

When some banks threatened to join Lehman Brothers on the scrapheap, the government stepped in to bail them out.

With so many big firms in trouble, the profession has been left to fend for itself with just the SRA left to administer the plasters. The regulator looks to be in danger of venturing out of its depth.

John Hyde is a Gazette reporter

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At the end of July, the current protocol for low-value road traffic accident claims will be extended to claims worth up to £25,000, and new protocols will be introduced for employers’ and public liability personal injury claims – draft copies of which have been published. New fixed recoverable fees for claimant lawyers, both within and outside the new and extended portals, have also been published.

But what about defendants’ costs?

Claimant lawyers have been pushing for fixed recoverable costs for defendants for some time. If claimants are restricted in the level of costs they can recover from defendants, why shouldn’t the same be true the other way round? Despite the new qualified one-way costs shifting regime in personal injury, there will still be circumstances (for example, when a claimant rejects a defendant’s Part 36 offer) where the claimant will have to pay some of the defendant’s costs.

Claimant representatives argue that it is only fair that claimants should have certainty over what these costs will be. Knowing the extent of adverse costs exposure would also be a big help to after-the-event insurers in setting premiums at the appropriate level. Sir Rupert Jackson recommended setting fixed recoverable costs for defendants in his Final Report, back in January 2010. And now, it seems, it is actually going to happen.

As the start date for the new protocols approaches, the Ministry of Justice has indicated that it is looking at options for setting fixed costs for defendants – and there is an expectation among industry experts that this is definitely going to happen. But it will not be straightforward. What level should these costs be set at? What data is available? Should the costs be staged? How will the costs take account of the point at which a claimant rejects a Part 36 offer – as the claimant may only be liable for costs after that point? All this must be considered.

In terms of the level of the fees, the claimant lobby would argue that defendants’ recoverable costs should be lower than the (somewhat meagre) sums available to claimants, because defendant lawyers usually get involved at a later stage than claimant lawyers, and the burden of proof lies with the claimant to prove their case. But no doubt defendants will be concerned that too low a fee would put them at a tactical disadvantage compared to claimants.

How precisely the defendant fees will operate, and what level they will be set at, remains to be seen. But given that they will be coming under intense scrutiny from both sides, let’s hope that they will be based on proper data and analysis, with transparency over how they were worked out.

Rachel Rothwell is editor of Litigation Funding magazine, providing in-depth coverage on costs and the financing of litigation.

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‘First you've got to get mad!’ The words of Peter Finch's character in '70s film The Network.

Judging by the stunning attendance at yesterday's Save Legal Aid demo outside the Ministry of Justice – to coincide with the end of the MoJ consultation on price-competitive tendering – you already are.

Mad isn't enough though. You'll probably sense or know that by now - you're clever.

You may also have spotted that although calls for solidarity from the socialist lawyers group, the Haldane Society, got applause, a general strike is not in the offing, and the society has no parliamentary party or MPs.

Proper protest that presses the buttons of hard power has been late coming to this issue. In fact, its arrival can't even be heard if you put your ears to non-electric tracks of public discourse.

Don't blame your professional bodies for that - I don't want to live in a country where the bar association decides the government of the day. But you have options.

If as an individual you are mad about what’s poised to happen to criminal justice, here's what to do - and believe me you don't have much time.

Step 1: go online and print off a list of the 60 most marginal parliamentary seats in the country going by 2010's results (and any seat that includes a Cabinet member in the top 120).

Step 2: work out which you are nearest.

Step 3: from the website of their local paper, or any other source, work out what's making people cross in the constituency.

Step 4: make contact with groups who are cross about those issues. Say you'll go online, deliver leaflets, knock on doors - anything to promote this cause that threatens to make the local MP unpopular.

Step 5: having started doing this (definitely including leaflets, as physical evidence looks good - hell, donate to these causes too), let the MP and their local party know why you were moved to make common cause. That too has to happen quite quickly.

Step 6: make all your engagement on this emotive issue very, very emotive. Carry on doing it.

All this may sound a bit bare-knuckled - and obvious (strangely, though obvious, it is not being done). But after covering debates on legal aid, and having spent 20 years in a party that's one half of this coalition - the half that was once good at winning by-elections - I can tell you this.

If you value what's left of legal aid - because it supports the kind of society you believe in, then it's time to recognise that the time for nice chats with ex-lawyers in the Commons and Lords is over. Those chats didn't do it. The campaign supremos and election agents didn't notice.

As poet Adrian Mitchell wrote, ‘sorry bout that’. I think the government's mind is made up on this one.

Getting mad was a start. But the arithmetic is currently firmly against legal aid's supporters, who have already lost so much. If the heat is felt in those 60-120 seats, that may change.

Otherwise, goodbye access to justice. You have precious little time to change that outcome.

Eduardo Reyes is Gazette features editor

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‘I don’t believe that most people who find themselves in our criminal justice system are great connoisseurs of legal skills.’

The words of justice secretary Chris Grayling in his interview with the Gazette last week defending plans to remove the ability of suspects to choose their solicitor, prompted much criticism.

Those criticisms reflect what many felt was arrogance in the assertion that those who get involved in the criminal justice system are essentially ‘too thick to pick’.

Grayling clearly has a low opinion of the intellectual ability of former parliamentarians including Jonathan Aitken and Jeffrey Archer. And indeed Ribble Valley MP Nigel Evans who was arrested on suspicion of rape.

His remarks ignore the fact that many people who are arrested and face trail are not guilty of any offence, but were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

To my mind they also demonstrate his lack of knowledge of the basic realities of the system that he is trying to transform.

Many people who use the services of lawyers, do so infrequently during their lifetime - generally when they move house, get divorced, when they prepare a will or a member of their family dies.

It’s fair to say therefore that the vast majority of the public are not ‘great connoisseurs of legal skills’.

But it is a fact that a large amount of crime is committed by a relatively small number of recidivist offenders, who for a multitude of reasons have been unable to break the spiral of offending.

That group's members come into frequent contact with lawyers and are, in fact, probably the finest connoisseurs of legal services. If anyone wants to know who the best briefs and worst briefs are in London, a chat with the residents of HMP Brixton or Wandsworth would tell you all you need to know.

How can it be that changes that could have such a fundamental and damaging impact on the criminal justice system and the rule of law have been designed by civil servants who seemingly lack understanding of how the system operates and are promoted by a uninterested and ill-informed secretary of state?

Catherine Baksi is a reporter on the Gazette

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