On 3 December a substantial conference, organised on behalf of the Legal Services Ombudsman, will take place at the Law Society's Hall in London.

The purpose of the conference will be to consolidate the current impetus for a more consumer-focused approach to client care and complaints handling within the legal profession.

The proceedings will be opened by Keith Vaz MP, parliamentary secretary in the Lord Chancellor's Department, and will include speakers from the medical profession, the financial services sector, as well as lawyers.

It is hoped that the conference will, in particular, attract those in the legal profession who have an interest in and a responsibility for improving client care and complaints handling.The current impetus for change has, of course, intensified during the summer with the departure of the director of the Office for the Supervision of Solicitors (OSS) and the critical reports compiled by Ernst & Young and by the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies.

To many solicitors, the recent difficulties at the OSS may nevertheless seem an irrelevance.

The prevailing view will perhaps be that most complaints about solicitors are largely without merit, fuelled by the intoxicating vapours of US-style consumerism and an unhealthy diet of populist journalism.

As the Law Society is always quick to point out, solicitors get through millions of transactions every year; the implication being that 30,000 complaints is nothing to get too worked up about.So what is all the fuss about? Well, the fuss is stirred partly by pragmatism and partly by principle.

At the pragmatic level, it is clear that, whatever the merits of most complaints - and professional complacency in this regard would certainly be misplaced - the OSS, or any other centralised bureaucracy for that matter, cannot cope with 30,000 complaints each year unless it benefits from the investment of far more money than any sane profession would want to contemplate.In the days when self-regulation encompassed just disciplinary matters, everything was relatively rosy - breaches of rules, black and white findings of fault, formal disciplinary procedures, definite sanctions.

These are issues with which lawyers are comfortable and with which any profession as guardian of club membership should be able to deal.The trouble is that the handling of consumer complaints has been grafted rather imperfectly on to that disciplinary system.

Yet consumer complaints are a different matter, murkier, greyer, crying out for informal solutions and compromise.

Centralised adjudication en masse, months and years after the event, is hardly a recipe for confidence and satisfaction.

When competition in the high street for the delivery of legal services is ever more intense, collective image and reputation will count more and more.

If, as happened recently, not just the BBC's Watchdog programme but the Financial Times devotes significant coverage to the failings of the OSS in the same week, it can be safely assumed that the image and reputation of solicitors as a whole are not being enhanced.

Hence, the fuss on grounds of pragmatism.But pragmatism is only part of the story.

The other part is an expectation that the legal profession will, as a matter of principle, consider itself bound to regard client care as an integral component of contemporary professionalism, not an optional extra.

This is hardly a revolutionary idea - the most traditional notions of professionalism have had at their centre the concept of service to clients and the common good.

What is new, perhaps, is the expectation that service will take account of client demands in such a way that legal practice conforms to a contemporary consumerist regime - written clarification of terms of business at the outset, operation of an explicit complaints-handling process as a means of settling grievances, and the provision of financial redress in the interests of conciliation.The paraphernalia of consumerism will no doubt be an irritant to some, a sign of an unhealthy preoccupation with style at the expense of substance.

Yet, behind the calls for a change of style, there rests a legitimate impulse to put clients at the centre of legal practice, to remind lawyers that it is the client's perspective that must be kept in view, and that lawyers and the legal system are there for the benefit of clients, and not the other way around.

That is a message that the profession at large can ill afford to ignore if the collective embarrassment occasioned by the troubles of the OSS this year is not to resurface again at even greater cost, financial and otherwise, to the ordinary practitioner.

It is the message underlying the various items which have appeared in the ombudsman's casebook featured in the Gazette over the past 18 months; and it is the starting-point for the forthcoming conference on 3 December.90:INSPIRING PUBLIC CONFIDENCE AND CLIENT SATISFACTION IN THE LEGAL PROFESSIONA one-day conference organised by the office of the Legal Services Ombudsman, 3 December 1999, 113 Chancery Lane, London WC2.

Keith Vaz MP, parliamentary secretary in the Lord Chancellor's Department, will open the conference.

Ann Abraham, the Legal Services Ombudsman, will set the agenda for change to a modern system of regulation.

Leading figures in the profession will map the way forward.

Practitioners will be offered practical ideas for improved customer service and complaints handling.

The conference is being sponsored by the Law Society, the Bar Council and the Consumers' Association.

For more information, contact The Customer Management Consultancy, tel: 01786 447190, fax: 01786 479315.