Should we be shocked at the idea of a website auctioning off cases to the highest bidder? It will make many instinctively uncomfortable, but it is arguably just a logical next step in the journey of the past four and a half years, since the ban on paying referral fees was lifted.

Indeed, no less an authority than Professor Richard Susskind has predicted that three types of technology will come together to enable consumers to go online and choose lawyers in a fundamentally new way – auctions, price comparison and systems that canvass consumer views on how they found goods and services.

As we reported recently, Moneysupermarket.com is to start offering price comparison – which Yorkshire Building Society already does in a limited way for conveyancing. Meanwhile, more information about law firms is starting to flood online. In the US, Avvo.com draws together publicly available data and gives lawyers a score out of ten. It is not hard to envisage such a site over here too.

These are unsettling times for solicitors as market liberalisation sweeps away many of the old ways. Karl Marx put it rather well – if we may be permitted to quote that rehabilitated economist: ‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy profaned.’ Whatever you think of this, there’s surely no going back now.