The legal profession locks horns with the insurance industry on a daily basis, and this animosity is only increased when a regulator or a government decides that the two must change their ways.

But in my three years at the Gazette, I can’t remember a single major battle won by solicitors; only the ensuing angry rants about the ‘overly powerful insurance lobby’.

So last week’s news was a bit of fresh air.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority decided to comprehensively rework its proposals for reform of the professional indemnity insurance (PII) market… prompting a vicious response from the Association of British Insurers (ABI), the mouthpiece of the industry.

The boot was clearly on the other foot.

The ABI labelled the amendments ‘inadequate’ and ‘a missed opportunity’, and said that failure to make radical changes would ‘damage the interests of solicitors’, ‘reduce consumer choice’, and ‘make insurance ever harder to find for smaller firms’.

For good measure, it also chastised the SRA as being ‘timid’ (contrast all this with the ABI’s response after the government announced that it was going to implement (most of) Jackson).

I was actually expecting the ABI to go as far as to say that, in light of the SRA’s changes, insurers will pull out of the PII market altogether - à la banks saying they will up sticks and leave the UK if the government decides to toughen regulation.

But the ABI didn’t go that far. In fact, there wasn’t even a hint of quitting in the ABI’s response.

Which seems to me like an acknowledgement of defeat.