As an international set of late night revellers pours into the Hippodrome in London's Leicester Square, the last thing on their minds is lawyers.

The bright young things are more interested in a few drinks to fuel several hours of aerobic-style dancing, with a bit of chat thrown into the bargain.But if a pair of middle-aged solicitors in Nottingham were not permanently at the end of a mobile telephone line, then the Hippodrome could be just another grey lump of listed Victorian property in central London.

And the beautiful people would have to take themselves elsewhere.

Jeremy Allen and Susanna Poppleston act for European Leisure, a national entertainment group of which the Hippodrome is the flagship.

The file is nearly a full-time job in itself.

Whenever either of the lawyers rings up the club's director there is a minimum of ten issues to sort through.Late-night liquor licences are the life blood of the monster clubs such as the Hippodrome, as well as the smaller more intimate venues scattered now throughout even the villages of England and Wales.

Licensing law historically has been about servicing the national breweries and the independent pub landlords.

But the 1980s and 1990s were a boom time first for the discos and then for the all-night clubs.

The Allen-Poppleston team is an unlikely entrant into the club legal scene.

In the 1980s Mr Allen was the managing partner of Hunt Dickens, a 16-partner Nottingham general practice, where he had built up a renowned reputation as a leading criminal lawyer.

Indeed, Mr Allen spent four years as the chairman of the Law Society's criminal law committee.Susanna Poppleston, too, wa s a criminal law and child-care specialist when she joined Hunt Dickins in 1987.

Not long before that, one of Mr Allen's partners dumped a file on his desk which involved a client who owned some nightclubs which were being taken over by Whitbreads.

The implication was that Mr Allen need not take on the file if he was not interested.But to his partners' surprise Mr Allen tackled the brief with gusto.

He contacted the club managers and asked what they wanted in the way of legal services.

'They had never had a solicitor do that before,' remembers Mr Allen.

'Any time they wanted anything we were on the end of the phone.

They had never had service like that before.'The word about this extra client care reached the Whitbread regional manager.

Mr Allen was then asked to take over the north of England before ultimately being handed the file for the whole country.'Looking back, I go cold at what we did then because we did not have a clue about a lot of it.

But we survived with a lot of luck,' says Mr Allen now.

After Ms Poppleston joined, the two carved out a licensing department at the firm.But the work was still seen by the pair as a top-up to their legal aid criminal and child care work.

The crunch decision came when Mr Allen had a conflict of dates between a low-profile child care case on which he had done substantial work and a licensing matter which had come in later.

He chose the licensing hearing.'I agonised over that', he recalls, 'and all my friends thought I would do the child care case.

But by then I knew that I had better concentrate solely on licensing work.'Also by that stage, Mr Allen and Ms Poppleston were feeling somewhat constrained by the partnership structure of the firm.

'One of the problems with having a licensing department in a larger firm was that we were being encouraged all the time to cross-sell other services -- commercial litigation and commercial property, for example.

And inevitably those services would be handled differently.'The two were being increasingly encouraged by several of the larger clients 'to go niche'.

And in April last year they did, setting up Poppleston Allen in a small road in central Nottingham.

They took the whole department of two paralegals, one trainee and three administrative staff with them.

Since then, the firm has taken on another paralegal and from October it will have an assistant solicitor.Ms Poppleston describes the first few weeks on their own as 'like diving off the diving board without knowing whether there was any water in the pool'.

But they received a big boost when all their licensing clients went with them.

And the two were able to maintain a stable working relationship with Hunt Dickens as they only took the licensing work which they were already doing, leaving all the company and commercial work at the firm.Now the client list has expanded even further and is about 80% plc based.

In addition to European Leisure, Poppleston Allen acts for the leisure arm of the Rank Organisation and the entertainment chain Fifth Avenue.

the partners have an exhausting workload; Mr Allen alone travels some 35,000 miles annually around the country.According to the pair, they act for more nightclubs than any other law firm in the country.

The most nerve-racking element of the work is the amount of money which can ride on the decision taken by a local council on whether to grant a licence.

For example, the Hippodrome recently sold for some £7 million.

Without a late night licence, it would probably be worth less than half that.Even smaller clubs have a lot riding on the decision.

Mr Allen points to one premises in a small town which is valued at £150,000 without a nightclub licence and some £1.5 million with one.What local councils and magistrates are most concerned about is that owners operate their nightclubs in accordance with certain statutory guidelines.

The food requirement is a particular problem because most clubbers are not interested in eating.Poppleston Allen takes the view that it should be involved from the very earliest stages of an application.

Licensing practitioners in the past, the firms maintains, would let the club owners deal with the authorities in the early stages while they would come in late to do the advocacy at the hearing.'We ring up the authorities almost on a daily pestering basis,' explains Ms Poppleston.

The extensive criminal law advocacy built up over the years in magistrates' courts has proved invaluable to Poppleston Allen.

Generally, licensing law solicitors come from a commercial law background and have not had much previous use for seat-of-the-pants advocacy.But even years in front of the magistrates could not have prepared Poppleston Allen completely for the quirky nature of licensing advocacy.

Ms Poppleston is known in the trade as the 'rave queen' because of her expertise on rave party applications.

She once appeared at a public hearing where there were nearly 200 objectors in the chamber.