Conditional fees are now a firmly established part of the legal landscape.

Some firms set up camp in conditional fee country a long time ago.

They may have spotted a few potholes -- and even fallen down the odd one or two -- but none of them has yet tumbled over the precipice.

Other firms are at an earlier stage of the journey.

And still others are only vaguely aware of the existence of the strange new land of conditional fees -- apparently a long way away, over the horizon -- and probably still hoping it is all just a trick of the light.

Conditional fee agreements (CFAs) -- where firms can charge their ordinary or an enhanced fee if they win and a lower or no fee if they lose -- have been allowed in this country since 1995.

Under the previous Lord Chancellor, Lord Mackay, they were introduced for personal injury, insolvency and human rights cases.

In 1998, the current government extended their use to most areas of civil litigation.

However, it is still early days.

Compared with other means of funding litigation, relatively few CFAs have been undertaken.

Abbey Legal Protection -- the largest CFA after-the-event insurer -- has signed up slightly more than 60,000 CFAs for personal injury cases since the scheme began in 1995.

Even allowing for cases covered by the handful of other after-the-event insurance (AEI) providers and for a few cases that have gone ahead uninsured, the total number of CFAs is unlikely to have crept much above 70,000 across all areas of litigation.

This is less than the number of legal aid certificates issued for personal injury alone (excluding medical negligence) in just one year: in 1997-98, some 74,137 such legal aid certificates were issued.

CFAs also remain a seriously under researched area despite -- or perhaps because of -- the government's enthusiasm for them.

However, the signs about how they are working out in practice, so far as they can be detected, seem mostly positive.

A number of milestones have already been reached.

MULTI-PARTY ACTIONSWe have seen the first multi-party action funded by CFA -- although, according to one of the lawyers involved, Martyn Day, it is likely to be his first and last CFA MPA.

The tobacco case (Hodgson v Imperial Tobacco) left his firm Leigh Day £2.5 million out of pocket when the judge ruled against them on limitation.

Without some kind of state funding, mass actions are effectively dead in this country, he says.

The other claimant firm involved, Irwin Mitchell, is not quite so down beat.

Partner Andrew Tucker says his firm might be prep ared to take on another case of this type -- although he concedes there is a limit to the number of financial hits any firm can take.

However, London-based Thompsons, another firm with considerable MPA experience, remains more optimistic about funding these cases by CFA.

Duncan Milligan, who works in the marketing department of Thompsons, points out that MPAs have a long history of being brought without legal aid, say with trade union funding.

He adds that Thompsons was actively looking at funding an MPA by CFA, but dropped the cases simply because the evidence on causation was not strong enough.

He does not see any intrinsic problems with bringing MPAs on conditional fee.

DEFAMATION Leading defamation firm Peter Carter-Ruck and Partners is claiming an unbroken run of success for its no win, no fee libel scheme since it was launched in December 1998.

The scheme, which received widespread publicity, includes the option of after-the-event insurance from either Litigation Protection or Saturn.

According to partner Alasdair Pepper, the firm takes on around one in ten of the CFA cases it is offered and says the weeding out process is usually relatively straightforward.

'With most of them, we will know within minutes of looking at the papers whether it's any good.' So far, the firm has taken on around 40 CFA cases, 25 of which have been concluded and 'in all of them, we have recovered something for the client and something for us,' says Mr Pepper.

Highest profile scalps claimed so far are from The Sun -- which libelled Helen Brinton MP -- and The Sunday Times, in a case which involved a five-day trial at the end of which the jury awarded the two claimants £45,000.

Mr Pepper concedes that this unbroken record cannot continue forever.

'Litigation is never certain,' he says.

'Things can go wrong.

By the law of averages, at some point we will be unsuccessful.' However, he insists that a loss will not deter the firm from continuing with the scheme.

Other libel firms are also doing CFA work, albeit perhaps not so enthusiastically and not taking such a structured approach.

For many, their preference remains that the financial risk of bringing a libel action should stay with the client rather than the firm.

As one leading libel solicitor remarked: 'It's not a case of if but when your client's skeletons fall out of the cupboard'.

Some firms will consider CFAs only if the client cannot afford to pay privately; to hang on to a high profile client who might otherwise take his or her business elsewhere; or where there are other reasons.

For example, the leading media firm Stephens Innocent recently acted on CFA for Ms B, the defendant in the widely reported rape defamation case.

Ms B's solicitor, Amber Melville-Brown, says this was a case that would otherwise have been done pro bono.

A CFA was entered into simply as a device for ensuring that if the firm had won, it would have been able to recover costs from the other side.

In the event, the jury could not reach a verdict and no orders for costs were made.

ACTIONS AGAINST THE POLICE Actions against the police is another area where CFAs have been making inroads.

Irwin Mitchell won £9,000 damages after a week-long jury trial for a client beaten up by the police, who did not qualify for legal aid.

After-the-event insurer Litigation Protection reckons it is already covering a couple of dozen such actions -- none of which has yet reached a conclusion.

AIthough the numbers are -- and are likely to remain -- small, the civil liberties implications of being able to hold the police a ccountable means the impact of CFAs in this area should not be underestimated.

With privately-funded actions against the police almost unheard of, anything which opens up access to justice -- even in a small way -- in this crucial area, should be welcomed.

CLINICAL NEGLIGENCE Clinical negligence was once seen as an area wholly unsuited to speculative funding, and there are still huge difficulties to be overcome before cases can be funded by CFA.

However, the recent flurry of activity by AEI companies in this area -- including the launch of an 'early bird' scheme by Litigation Protection which aims to reduce drastically the costs of getting an action off the ground -- shows that they, at least, think there is money to be made with clinical negligence.

HOUSING DISREPAIR Housing disrepair cases are being tipped in some quarters as the next big area ripe for applications of conditional fees.

CFA doyen solicitor Kerry Underwood says housing disrepair most closely follows the personal injury (PI) model in having the ingredients needed to make CFAs work.

These include high success rates, an insured opponent and a high volume of cases.

COMMERCIAL FIRMS In the main, commercial firms have been rather more cautious about dipping their toes in the CFA pond.

However, City giant Linklaters has just broken ranks by announcing it will take appeals against decisions by the pensions ombudsman on CFA.

The eclectic and esoteric range of areas where conditional fees are being used suggests that the only limit on the areas of litigation where they might apply, is that of the imagination of the firms involved.

For many, the idea that their area of work could be funded by CFA is almost unthinkable -- as some of the more knee-jerk reactions to the Linklaters announcement demonstrated.

However, those firms which do not have the vision to see how CFAs could apply to them, may find they are losing out to their more imaginative competitors.

The funding litigation session at the Law Festival (Payment by results: the poisoned apple?) is designed precisely to capture firms' imagination and show them what the possibilities of the new funding arrangements might be.

Sponsored by the specialist magazine Litigation Funding, the session will bring together some of the leading litigators in the country and throw them in at the deep end.

Using the hypothetical scenario of a massive disaster at an oil refinery, these senior lawyers will have to explore how the people and companies affected -- ranging from a self-employed lorry driver to a multi-national based in the US -- could fund their action -- whether as claimant or defendant -- using no win, no fee.

Two leading American tort lawyers will also be there to explain how a country, rather further down the payment-by-results track, does these things.

FUNDING LITIGATION PAYMENT BY RESULTS: the poisoned apple? Session 26 at the Solicitors Annual Conference will be moderated by John Howard, broadcaster and solicitor, who formerly presented You and Yours on Radio 4 and Out of Court on BBC2.

It will use parallel, hypothetical studies of a heavyweight commercial dispute and a consumer claim, both with transatlantic dimensions, to illustrate the issues and problems of funding litigation following the recent introduction of conditional fees to all areas of civil litigation.