'Compulsory competitive tendering has done terrible things to our department,' one local government lawyer, who did not want to be named, said recently.

'The last two years have been dreadful and destructive.

We used to love coming to work but now the atmosphere is just awful.'By next April, the prospect of CCT for legal services will have become a reality in the London borough and metropolitan district councils.

That is the deadline by which contracts must have been awarded to either private firms or in-house teams for 45% of the work.

Inevitably some local government lawyers will have lost their jobs.In 'true blue' Conservative Wandsworth, where 75% of legal services has been contracted out, many lawyers have already been moved to non-legal jobs in the council, such as work on leasehold-related management.

Along the Thames, in Lambeth, the legal department has been accused in a report by Elizabeth Appleby QC of mismanagement during the 1980s which allowed an unofficial council policy of undermining the CCT legislation (see [1995] Gazette, 9 August, 2) to flourish.In the north, the Newcastle branch of Unison is preparing to lobby all council departments, asking them to refuse to co-operate with any private law firm which might take the tender from their in-house legal team (see [1995] Gazette, 9 August, 2).But some local government lawyers are optimistic about the power of their departments to defeat the threat of the private firms which are often seen by authorities as rabid dogs slavering at the council doors.'In my experience, private firms have got to be three times more productive than my staff to be competitive and I do not think that is possible,' said Meic Sullivan-Gould, borough solicitor at Basingstoke and Dean Borough Council, which twinned with Northampton firm Shoosmiths & Harrisons in 1993 to learn how to win at the CCT game.The image of local government contracts as fat lumps of work for hungry high street practices has also been challenged by a marked lack of firms willing to bid in some parts of the country.'We only had three bids,' said Stewart Dobson, director of legal services at Birmingham.

'I have kept in touch with other big city councils and that level of response is not untypical.

At the moment there does not seem to be a view abroad that this type of local authority work is going to be very attractive to private firms.'John Swan, assistant director of administration at Sunderland, had a more positive experience: 'At least three local firms, which had already done work for us, initially expressed an interest but then came back and said they did not want to compete knowing that there would be an in-house bid.

We were heartened because they said they would be happy to do any surplus work.'Research conducted by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation during summer 1994 into local authorities' experience of blue collar CCT suggested that competition had caused job losses and worse working conditions in some councils but better management in others.

Although the report said the impact of CCT had not been uniform and had varied between services, it predicted that competition would become fiercer as white collar work entered the market.The Department of the Environment has just commissioned research by the consultancy firm Newchurch into the effectiveness of CCT policies in improving service quality in white collar work, including legal work.

But, so far, no one knows who will get a decent slice of the legal CCT cake.

It may be the local government lawyers who will fight off the competition and emerge, in the words of Mr Sullivan-Gould, 'leaner, meaner, fitter and with a lot more facts on what clients want'.Or it may be the private practices which lap up the work, forcing local government lawyers into the dole queue or council housing departments or, indeed, into a private practice under the ambiguous shield of the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 1981.TUPE has been widely debated in the last decade and the issue of pensions is still unconfirmed by case law.

The chair of the Law Society's employment law committee, Janet Gaymer, says the case law is in a mess and is still being worked out in the European courts.In a recent report the committee said it was hard to establish, in the case of lawyers moving from a local government department to a private contractor, whether the transferred service had the organisational independence necessary for it to form an economic entity which would be covered by TUPE.

The report expressed concern about the possible discriminatory effect of marginalising contract workers from employment protection in this area.However, the Local Government Management Board believes many CCT contracts will be caught by TUPE.

Some local government legal departments are trying to circumvent uncertainty by writing full benefits into the contract regardless of whether TUPE applies.Russell Power, a solicitor at Tower Hamlets, said: 'We think that TUPE should apply and we would not accept an external bid where it appeared not to apply.'But in Wandsworth, contracts were drawn up on the basis that TUPE did not apply.

In addition to the problem of TUPE there is also widespread unease among local government lawyers about the rapidly changing rules for CCT proper.

The departments in the front line of tendering feel that they are shooting in the dark.Sheila Bull, director of legal and administrative services at Walsall, said: 'The whole process has made people nervous.

To a degree it has been divisive and confusing because of the lack of clarity about which rules apply.

The auditors and the government hold different views and even at this late stage there are still guidelines coming out.

This shows CCT up for the imprecise exercise which it is.'Bill Church, director of law and administration at Hertfordshire County Council, has some words of advice for lawyers lost in the maze of CCT.

It is over two years since his department put their conveyancing work out to tender as part of a market testing exercise and finally awarded it in-house.

'Both sides need to be clear about the amount of work which there is going to be,' said Mr Church.

'You have to decide whether there will be a volume guarantee and, if not, what the target is.

We did not promise a fixed volume of work but our offer contained our best estimate.' The Law Society's local government group has steadfastly opposed the compulsory nature of the government's tendering legislation.

But now group spokesman David Swallow, says: 'There are a number of strategies in play at the moment and a lot of original ideas.

We can only wait and see how it will turn out.

I am not sure if, at the end of the day, we will be able to say whether CCT was good or bad.'