Representing clients who are in prison brings challenges unknown in other parts of the profession.

The apparently simple act of setting up a meeting with the client, for example, may be fraught with difficulty in a system which may allow a prisoner to be moved several days before the solicitor is informed by letter.Daniel Machover, a partner at London firm Hickman Rose, gives an example: 'You can turn up at a prison to find your client has been moved.

Or you can have made an appointment, but when you get there the client hasn't been told you are coming.'The practical problems are not confined to getting into prisons.

It is just as bad when the prison transport has to deliver prisoners to a solicitor, according to Malcolm Fowler, a criminal defence partner at Birmingham firm Putsmans, who was speaking 90 minutes into the latest instance he had suffered.

'I am waiting now at Crown Court for a prisoner who was due here at 10am from a prison in Leicestershire.

I don't know now if we'll get on before dark,' he complains.According to Zurka Wahid, acting secretary of the Law Society's criminal law committee, of which Mr Fowler is chairman, neither of these examples is unusual.

She says: 'It takes ages getting appointments.

There are problems with not being able to see clients for long enough, and not having time to go through all the evidence.

Solicitors have to go down at weekends to see them, using family and friends visits to get access.'Both the prison rules, and the way they are interpreted by prison officers cause the problems, she says: 'With c ategory A [the most dangerous] prisoners, there is all the security to go through, which shortens the visiting time further.

All the checks come out of the short allotted time.' The issue of searching solicitors visiting clients in prison has been a thorny one for many years.Mr Machover describes a typical visit to a high-security prison, which may be hundreds of miles away from his office because prisoners are repeatedly moved.

Solicitors tend to feel irritation and frustration rather than the fear of being closed in which prisoners feel when the door slams.'Sniffer dogs come up to you to check you for drugs.

Some lawyers find it highly offensive and start protesting.

I don't bother.

For me its irritating because it wastes time when I want to be with the client.

I've had big and small dogs.

I don't particularly like dogs.

I don't find it pleasant but I just grin and bear it.'He has had one prison officer giving him a rub-down search while another appeared to be using the time to read his private papers, ostensibly checking for paper-clips which might help a prisoner escape.'There are some prisons with private cubicles, and in some others you don't feel they are very private.

Sometimes there are social visits going on in the same room.

I want the client to feel comfortable its more for them than for me.'Not surprisingly, according to Mr Machover, a prisoners' rights expert specialising in assaults on inmates, a relatively small number of firms handle most cases of prisoners who believe they have been unfairly treated.

Some, such as BM Birnberg & Co, Thanki Novy & Taube and Hickman Rose, all in London, also do criminal defence work.

Others, like Batt Murphy, have established a new niche prisoners' civil rights practice, and do no defence work.Birnbergs and Hickman Rose are among the firms handling the high-profile Wormwood Scrubs assault cases against prison officers.

Four officers have already been found guilty and sentenced to between 12 and 18 months in prison, five have been acquitted, and further 19 will have their cases heard in the coming weeks.Mr Machover explains that the complex nature of prisoners' rights cases makes them a challenge for solicitors who only handle a few such cases.

The solicitor has to be aware of prison rules, then a series of labyrinthine standing orders, circular instructions, and specialist judicial review case law.'It's a specialised area of work.

Its difficult to dabble and do it half well for your client,' he says.

'Within prison rights there are specialist sub-areas like adjudication, discretionary licence, transfer problems, categorisation problems.

I don't want to make it sound mystical -- like all areas of law you need to demystify it -- that's the job of a lawyer, but that demystification is a task which has to be done.'It is not surprising, he concludes, that many lawyers specialising in criminal defence work want to stick with it and not be drawn into the labyrinth.

If one of their clients inside has a problem with the prison authorities, they will usually be referred to a specialist.In any event, in the coming months the option to dabble will be taken away by changes in legal aid rules under the Criminal Defence Service.

Next spring, prisoners' rights work will become open only to firms with a specialist prison rights practitioner to supervise it.But at the moment, prisoners are much in the news for a predicted flood of claims under the Human Rights Act 1998, which came into force this week.

That prisoners might be able to make claims is seen by opponents as the prime e xample of what is wrong with the Act.

For some, prisoners' rights is a contradiction in terms.The Prison Service has even stimulated demand by putting up posters in jails telling prisoners they can claim under the new law if they believe their rights have been violated.

The Prison Reform Trust and Sir David Ramsbotham, the chief inspector of prisons, are among those predicting the Act will open the door for challenges to several aspects of prison conditions.One likely area is expected to be article 6, the right to a fair trial, where prisoners may challenge the current disciplinary regulation allowing prison governors to add six weeks to a sentence without the prisoner been entitled to legal representation.Another patch of fertile ground is thought to be article 3, freedom from torture and inhuman treatment, where prisoners will try to argue that overcrowded and segregated prisons are unlawful.Hamish Arnott, a solicitor for the Prisoners Advice Service, says: 'We've had a lot of prisoners asking what it will mean.

Some are very up on the law.'At the same time, many solicitors want to dampen down the wilder expectations of the effects of the Act.

Some prisoners have unrealistic expectations that they can challenge almost everything, including their convictions, on a completely new playing field.Mr Arnott says: 'Some prisoners think it is a new set of rules -- a European law, rather than something bolted on to existing UK law.' They will be disappointed.He says lawyers have been taking prisoners' cases to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg anyway over the years, so many of the issues where it might be thought would have an impact have already been tested, and either failed or incorporated already into UK law.The good news for prisoners preparing this flood of cases is that quite a lot of work initially will be funded, because it will come out of the uncapped part of the civil legal aid budget.

It becomes more complicated to take court challenges, but most prisoners will be eligible for legal aid if they have a good case, Mr Machover says.The bad news, though, he adds, is that like asylum cases, there will probably not be enough solicitors to go round.

He says Hickman Rose already has more prison rights cases than it can handle: 'We are turning people away.'Mr Fowler predicts, in the absence of enough solicitors wanting to take their cases, that prisoners will bring their cases to court anyway.

The courts will have to try to sort the wheat from the chaff, with all the attendant drain on court time.He says there is a deeper issue of access to justice if there are not enough solicitors to meet demand, and if obstacles are continually placed in the way of those who do represent prisoners.Mr Fowler voices a common view among criminal law solicitors, but almost forgotten in Westminster and the country at large: 'Prisoners are still entitled to all their rights except liberty.' But he knows also that 'there aren't any votes in looking after prisoners'.At a policy-making level, under the last government and this, the attitude has hardened against the rights of individual clients to a fair trial, says Roger Ede, until this year secretary of the Law Society's criminal law committee, now an acting district judge and author of several criminal law books.He discussed security and access regularly with Home Office and Prison Service officials for several years and previously worked for 15 years as a criminal solicitor.

He says: 'There is no doubt that several years ago the Prison Service gave the impression o f being much keener to make prison visits much more accessible than they do now.'And long term, Mr Machover is not alone in believing the authorities may use the Human Rights Act to diminish rather than increase prisoners cases in some areas.

'In effect they will be able to say "you've got the Human Rights Act, you don't need any other protection".

And the Human Rights act was rudimentary, and drawn up 50 years ago, and has been and will probably continue to be interpreted conservatively by judges.'