'Television advertising buys you a degree of fame,' says Harry MacAuslan, deputy chairman of the advertising agency J Walter Thompson.

But he adds a warning: 'The danger is that the discretion of legal advice is compromised by the medium.'The legal profession's anxiety has been awakened by t hree high-profile decisions to use television to canvass for business.

Claims Direct, a claims management firm with 300 law firms on its panel, has been advertising aggressively -- few people with a television could have failed to see one in recent months.Underwoods, a small law firm in St Albans led by conditional fee expert Kerry Underwood, has been advertising regionally on Anglia Television for personal injury and employment clients, while Accident Line, the Law Society-sponsored personal injury service, is to spend £2.5 million on television advertising to spearhead its re-launch next month.Mr MacAuslan says there is a possibility that mass advertising will undermine the gravitas of the legal profession in the eyes of the public; similarly, he maintains that the proliferation of commercials promoting cosmetic surgery has 'undermined the sense of probity of the medical profession'.He explains: 'We all like to think our decisions about things like law and medicine are dictated by reasoned choice, not by emotional brand values.'Eileen Pembridge, who is now chairwoman of the Law Society's reputation working party, is sensitive to the risks, but she says TV advertising is a necessary evil: 'There is something slightly toe-curling about seeing ambulance-chasing adverts,' she says.

'But the hugely increased competition means solicitors must be forever trying to find ways to expand and bring in extra business.' Solicitors must not leave the field open to claims-handlers, she says.And she agrees that solicitors need to present something more imaginative than 'the po-faced ads of the old variety', in which solicitors presented an image of probity and little else.Certainly Claims Direct has no doubts about the cost-effectiveness of television advertising.

Peter Carlile, its commercial director, says it generates 1,000 calls a day from potential clients, and those will translate into 50,000 cases passed to solicitors in the next financial year.

'We tried posters, and we do some radio, but there's no question, nothing produces the same response as television.'Chris Ward, managing director of Abbey Legal, which administers the Law Society's Accident Line, has accepted this same economic logic.

He already has a script ready for advertisements to begin transmission on television late this year or early next, and he highlights the power of television to overcome negative images of solicitors which are obstacles to attracting some clients.'In the past, the legal profession hasn't done itself an enormous amount of service in the image it has projected.

It has been seen as remote and expensive.' By appearing in a chatty, friendly advert sandwiched between a chat show and a soap, lawyers will seem approachable.

By offering no win no fee, they will overcome the client's fear that the meter starts ticking as soon as they pick up the phone to a lawyer, he says.TV needn't be all that expensive.

If you are trying to buy into the middle of a wedding on Coronation Street, then it costs a fortune.

But something obscure on Channel Four at two in the morning won't be.

The reality is to find the right compromise between those two.'The Underwoods campaign features three different advertisements.

The first, for its personal injury work, features a hurdles race with men in suits and the tag-line 'we work harder to win because if we don't win, we don't get paid'.

The other two show ordinary people worrying about bringing an action -- one for personal injury and one for employment claims -- again finishing with the line 'if we don't win, we don' t get paid'.Mr Underwood has attracted enough business through the £350,000 campaign to be continuing and expanding them.

He is also trying to recruit 20 new personal injury solicitors to handle the work generated.

He has been impressed not only by the quantity, but by the quality of response from television advertisements.

'The proportion which translate into cases is similar to other forms of advertising,' he says.But as Ms Pembridge, senior partner of south London firm Fisher Meredith, points out, mass advertising works for personal injury in a way it would not for areas her firm specialises in, such as family, immigration and claims against the police.Personal injury claims are for money, which will pay the solicitor's bill.

They are also easy to assess, and usually successful.

But she says: 'Claims against the police are much more complicated and may not produce compensation.' Legal aid cuts have meant that in areas of law such as asylum, firms cannot afford to take on more clients, and there is a shortage of specialist practitioners.

'Any firm which advertised for asylum seekers would be swamped,' she says.Accident Line, Underwoods and Claims Direct all justify their TV advertising on the grounds that it is making a high-class service more widely available -- increasing access to justice.

Mr Underwood insists he has never encountered a spurious claim.

'There might be an employment case where the person has not worked for the 12 months required by law, so they don't have a case we can fight.

But I've never had a claimant who does not have a genuine grievance,' he says.It was grievances from solicitors rather than clients that saw an end to a television advertising campaign run a few years ago by the Law Society of Scotland.

The 'It's never too early to call a solicitor' campaign featured ten-second adverts showing a man in various awkward situations reaching for the telephone.

According to research, the advertisements proved popular with the public and materially improved perceptions of the profession.

However, it was less popular with the profession itself, and the larger commercial firms, seeing no direct benefits and faced with a levy to continue, voted to end it in 1994.Reflecting on the campaign later, John Elliot, who chaired the Law Society of Scotland's marketing committee, said it was not axiomatic that a campaign popular with the public would not be popular with the profession, but he described it as a distinct possibility.

'Solicitors have difficulty putting themselves in their clients' shoes,' he argued.Five years ago, the Law Society selected J Walter Thompson from a beauty parade of agencies to put together an advertising campaign for the profession as a whole.

Ms Pembridge recalls that the idea foundered because the profession was thought too fragmented for a single generic campaign.The most successful advertising campaigns for any product are those in which the advertisers have decided exactly what they are selling.

The other key ingredients are a long-term commitment to a campaign, and high expenditure.Many in the City think the profession is now so diverse that the activities of ambulance-chasers have little or no effect on their corporate cousins' profile.Barry Jackson, head of marketing at Herbert Smith, is relaxed about the danger that his firm's lawyers' image will be tarnished when they go in to bat at a meeting alongside bankers and accountants.

He says corporate and high street solicitors are two separate worlds, and commercial clients are sophisticated enough to see them as such.'I don't believe personal injury advertising downgrades what the corporate lawyer does,' he insists.Mr Jackson comes from an accountancy background with Arthur Andersen, one of the only UK professional services firms to spend millions on advertising, including peak-time television around the former ITN flagship, News at Ten.He says the same approach could be effective for a City law firm, to boost its corporate profile, although he does not expect it to happen at Herbert Smith in the foreseeable future.Ms Pembridge says there will be a Law Society-driven push soon to improve the public image of all solicitors, but it will use a variety of indirect methods, such as forging links with educationalists, making sure the right spokespeople are readily available for media interviews, and even trying to change the stereotyped lawyers often portrayed in soap operas.But however much money is spent on a mass advertising campaign, the product has to meet the promises of the adverts.

Underwoods, for example, has trained its solicitors to talk without legal jargon, to match the approachable image fostered by the television commercial.Advertising can only work long-term if the consumers enjoy what they have bought, and come back for more.

As Mr MacAuslan at J Walter Thompson says: 'As food manufacturers have found recently, in the long-term, it is the quality of the product that is important.'S2K -- AN ANNUAL CONFERENCE WITH A DIFFERENCEMarketing and television advertising will be just one of many issues tackled at Solicitors 2000, or S2K, which aims to be a short, sharp shock of an event with a highly practical focus.

It runs the whole of Saturday, 4 November, with a single plenary session on the following Sunday morning.

As it is taking place at the Law Society, space is limited.

The conference begins at 9.15 am on-- Practice in the 21st century;-- Young Solicitors;-- Funding litigation;-- The Human Rights Act; and-- E-business -- the Web and legal services.The funding litigation session might be particularly interesting, throwing together as it does conditional fee expert Kerry Underwood and Colin Poole, the solicitor chief executive of Claims Direct.After lunch, the forums will cover:-- Legal aid;-- Complaints;-- Management;-- The Human Rights Act; and-- E-business 2 -- how to make use of the Internet.Saturday with a keynote speech from Law Society president Michael Napier.

This is followed by a plenary session, moderated by BBC broadcaster and solicitor John Howard, on 'the big issues'.

Solicitor Digby Jones, director-general of the Confederation of British Industry, is one of the panel members.

The conference then breaks into 75-minute forums covering:The final set of forums after tea will cover:Professional indemnity;Marketing;Lifestyle issues;E-business 3 -- assessing technology needs.In the evening, there will be a dinner at the Royal Courts of Justice.

The following day, ex-BBC man Joshua Rozenberg, newly installed as the Daily Telegraph's legal editor, will moderate a session on the reputation of the profession.