Lord Irvine has given solicitors the opportunity to make a decisive step forward in becoming advocates in the higher courts.

Newly published proposals from the Law Society will, if the Lord Chancellor is as good as his word, give an enormous boost to solicitor-advocates.The Lord Chancellor set out his policy in a consultation document last year.

He enthused: 'Now is the time for more radical change .

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all qualified barristers and qualified solicitors should in principle have the right to appear in any court .

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professional bodies .

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should be able to ensure that their members are properly trained to exercise these rights, and .

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be able to impose any rules of conduct necessary to maintain high standards.

However, any such requirements should be tested against the public interest in allowing access to the courts, and ensuring that no unjustified restrictions are placed on the exercise of rights of audience.'The Law Society responded by establishing a task force, chaired by Kerry Macgill, a former chairman of the Solicitors Association of Higher Court Advocates (SACHA).

Its membership included a number of people with experience of training in advocacy and practitioners with higher court rights, like myself.

Our proposals were finally approved by the Society's Council in February.

They are being submitted to the Lord Chancellor this week.

Under the Access to Justice Act 1999, Lord Irvine will submit them for comment to a newly constituted legal services consultative panel.

This has a narrower brief than the former Advisory Committee on Legal Education and Conduct and we must hope the panel will approve our proposals with minimal suggestions for change.Our challenge is to increase the numbers of solicitor-advocates from the current figure of around 1,000 who have rights of audience in either the civil or criminal higher courts or both.

The task force considered hard the advantages and disadvantages of the criminal and civil split.

Many practitioners specialise in civil or criminal work.

However, the division has led to practical problems, such as when a solicitor-advocate with criminal rights was unable to appear in a judicial review relating to those proceedings.

Thus the task force opted decisively for mirroring the Bar's position a nd argued that the split qualification should become a thing of the past.A key challenge has been to prepare proposals that will reduce the cost of obtaining the qualification, maintain standards and reflect the natural bias of a solicitor's work towards civil or criminal work, but at the same time give general rights of audience.

We have come up with a package with three elements: training in advocacy skills; training in procedure, evidence and ethics; and practical experience.

By 2006 this will be the only route to qualification, and we propose dropping the current exemption and experience routes.The advantage of dividing advocacy training from the rest is that we hope to isolate the part of the process that requires high staff/student ratios and is necessarily expensive.

We propose a training course of a minimum of 18 hours together with a three-hour assessment.

This can be oriented towards criminal or civil practice but the assessment will contain common elements such as a requirement to argue a point of law.

The practice, evidence and ethics training will cover both civil and criminal matters.

We hope to establish an approach for this in which students will learn the rules by way of being able to contrast their different (or similar) application in different types of case.The final component will be a year's experience of civil or criminal proceedings.

Students will have to complete a portfolio that will encourage reflection.

This will be signed off by a mentor.We now await the Lord Chancellor's response.

We are confident our proposals meet his challenge.

Let us hope he will agree.