The Eagle comic predicted in the 1950s that, by 1989, most people would fly to work using jetpacks, living beneath the sea would be as ordinary as living in a semi-detached house, and world hunger would have been eliminated with the aid of food pellets.

Forewarned by the premature excitability of Eagle, sometimes it is tempting to believe that when it comes to the world's big law firms (and many of the real giants are headquartered in the Square Mile), present trends will not necessarily prove to be a guide to the future.Were we to pursue their theme without the expected pinch of salt, it would be easy to describe the global legal village of the year 2050: most legal advice will be available on-line, or in some sophisticated variant thereof.

Diversity will have been dislodged by a cabal of seven or eight 'one-stop shops', the brand names of which are recognised from Bank to Baku.

Legions of marketing personnel will become the movers and shakers, and anybody averse to all things IT will be consigned to the wilderness.In this brave new world, the nationality of a firm will be seen as a relic of a bygone age, and lawyers will be only one component in organisations that offer 'professional service advice' from management consultancy to IT training.

At the more nightmarish end, one might imagine that at some not too distant point in the future, partners who are neither photogenic or in possession of the kind of social skills that business development departments dream about, will receive cosmetic surgery and retraining.

The human touch will only be acceptable in its most charismatic and sellable guise.Certainly, some of these elements are likely to be realised.

Law firms have not stopped growing, and worldwide partnerships are rapidly becoming reality.

The prospect of a spate of significant transatlantic mergers can only be around the corner; by the year 2050 they will surely have become old hat (even if, as is also likely, some of those pond-straddling titans have by then de-merged decades ago.) And the speed of change within the IT industry promises to keep at least some aspects of the legal profession in a state of permanent revolution.

Tony Angel is the managing partner of Linklaters.

He points to the one fact of life that has to stop the growth of law firms in its tracks: the issue of conflict of interest.

'I certainly don't see the emergence of five big international firms,' he says, 'although perhaps 10, 12 or 15 major global players is foreseeable.' It is the conflicts issue which also puts a natural cap on the expansion of multi-disciplinary partnerships.

Alan Peck, chief executive of Freshfields, thinks that while regulatory obstacles are sure to be revoked, market demand is going to create the natural parameters of 'one-stop shopping'.

Mr Angel predicts a 'stratification' within the realm of commercial law.

'Firms like ours will continue to have a global presence, but likewise, there will always be an important role to play for smaller City firms - like Slaughter and May, and Ashurst Morris Crisp, and for national firms, and multi disciplinary partnership s.' Nonetheless, he concedes that 'the number of players in the market will diminish.

You'll see a good deal of concentration yet.' Sometimes the profile accorded to the biggest firms overshadows any discussion of the role that smaller, or boutique commercial law firms will have to play.

Chris Preston, a partner at the structured finance specialist firm Watson, Farley & Williams, shares Mr Angel's belief that in 50 years from now, a firm such as his will still occupy an important niche.

And he accepts that his firm will have to bulk out - employing more lawyers, in more cities, and covering more practice areas - if it is to stay ahead.

'There's still a role', he says, 'for a focused niche practice.

But it has to be bigger and stronger.' He would like to see his firm doubled in size in the next few years, with a stronger presence in New York, the Far East, and in Europe.

Many lawyers now pride themselves on being IT-friendly, and firms have invested fortunes in their computer systems and training.

But according to e-commerce partner Quentin Solt at Berwin Leighton, there are still firms that use their wordprocessors as little more than glorified typewriters.

He says the key word at the moment is 'commoditisation' delivering legal services more quickly and effectively using computers.Linklaters' Blue Flag initiative is the only computer-delivered legal service commodity that strikes genuine awe into the hearts of competitors.

But once on-line delivery of legal basics becomes both more sophisticated and commonplace, the challenge for the City firms is going to lie in offering services that computers cannot.

Mr Peck is aware of this: 'I think that clients are going to expect to receive a lot of services for free.

And we'll be under pressure to provide them.' Mr Angel does not believe that this is a trend which will alter legal services beyond recognition: 'In the long term, clients are still going to pay lawyers for their experience, and for their problem-solving abilities.'City law firms know how important it is to anticipate the future.

They also know that it is not clear what the future holds.

World progress is comfortingly unsteady; capitalism's inexorable march has not proved so inexorable after all.

(There are many firms still ruing the day they decided that Moscow was going to be the next big thing.) Big may prove not to be beautiful, or at least, not manageable.

As Mr Peck points out: 'There's always the semi-armageddon theory that we'll all get our knickers into a twist and end up splitting because of conflicts.' But it is probably safe to say that whatever is happening in 50 years' time, the City will be playing a leading role.WILL THE NEW CENTURY SEE THE DEATH OF THE HIGH STREET FIRM? STEPHEN WARD LOOKS AT THE PLIGHT OF SMALL PRACTICESSix months ago, Philip Bailey was still managing partner of a typically small high street firm.

'We were busy but we didn't have sufficient income to meet increasing expenditure,' he recalls.

The steeply rising professional indemnity fee was a particular burden, he says.

The firm, Burd Pearse in Okehampton, Devon, had seemed to him to be charging about the same as it had 20 years ago.Then, in May, it joined larger Exeter firm Stones to form a practice with 18 partners.

The outlook is now brighter, Mr Bailey explains: 'The merger has enabled us to pay back-up staff to take over administration which the partners had been handling themselves.

Now we can spend more time earning fees.'There is plenty of support in the profession for the theory that stories like Burd Pearse's are a sig n of the imminent demise of the high street practice - squeezed in the same way as the family butcher or green grocer has been hit by the supermarket.High street solicitors' main areas of income are under pressure.

Legal aid franchising is restricting green form work.

Conveyancing fees are at a historic low, and there is a threat from licensed conveyancers.

The top end of wills and probate work is being taken by the banks, while the government is trying to reduce the involvement of solicitors in divorce settlements.

Personal injury work is being removed from firms who are not on the Law Society's expert panel.Laurence Bennett, a consultant with three-partner Merseyside high street firm Goodmans, mentions an additional pressure: 'There is a rising expectation from clients which is often unrealistic.' With conveyancing, for example, he says: 'They want every 'i' dotted and every 't' crossed, on the other hand they don't want it to take any time.' As any solicitor knows, work that has to be done quickly makes less profit.Noel Fagan, finance partner at Hill Dickinson with three offices and 60 partners in the north west of England, where he specialises in work for small businesses, can apply the same strict economic analysis when he looks at what he calls the 'solicitors' industry'.

In management terms, he says, many busy solicitors firms illustrate the rule that 'turnover isn't profit'.

He says: 'Normally a business will be advised to 'drop the dross', the areas of low earning work.

It's sometimes hard for solicitors to do that.

They have to keep taking everything.'Yet despite this analysis, he thinks - for now at least - that reports of the death of the high street are more alarmist than they need to be.

'There have been relatively few bankruptcies, relatively few big failures,' he says.

'Banks don't see solicitors' firms as a big problem, but they do see them as a sector to watch carefully.' Although prudent enough not to want to speculate more than a decade into the next century, he says there are ways the high street firms can survive.The important thing for them to master is management which is now crucial.

'Twenty years ago it was ok to be a good engineer or a good lawyer,' he says.

'Now you have to be a good manager.'Small firms can become specialists.

Mental health law could be a successful niche for a small firm, he suggests.

So might employment law.

Sole practitioners might work from home more.

This is the most cost efficient way, to 'work with a laptop from the kitchen table' with few overheads.Many small firms, like Burd Pearse, are already merging, to bring economies of scale.

But there could be more imaginative solutions, Mr Fagan suggests, where several sole practitioners form a 'chambers' in a single building, sharing overheads but administratively separate, each specialist in a different area.The Law Society, has recognised the plight of the small practice, and set up a high street task force in the early summer to see what can be done to help.

Mr Fagan, with 20 years' experience himself in a small firm, was for a time a member of the task force.In the past, the Society flirted with trying to hold back the tide of competition by restricting entry to the profession and fixing conveyancing fees, but has now realised that was not realistic or even legally possible.Mr Bennett, who chairs the task force, says: 'The conclusions we've reached are that high street firms need advice.

They need assistance in their planning.' But he adds that small high street firms can be successful.

His own practice - consistin g of three offices, three partners, with a legal aid franchise, offering crime, matrimonial, welfare, conveyancing and commercial work - is expanding.He agrees with Mr Fagan that other firms can do as well, but adds: 'They must adapt and change.

Some may have to consider ceasing to exist as separate entities.

They need strategies informed by the best quality advice available.' The Law Society is exploring ways to make sure the advice reaches those who need it.The Legal Action Group has identified a clear threat to the consumer's interest if the small firms are driven by pure market forces to merge into bigger and bigger units.

Vicki Chapman, former policy director and now at the Law Society, says the local provision is particularly important in rural districts and in areas of law such as matrimonial where husband and wife need separate representation.

It is important there can still be at least two firms within a convenient distance.Ms Chapman is hopeful that the new structure for the Legal Aid Board, which according to the Lord Chancellor will identify areas of 'legal desert', can fill gaps.

'There are examples of where law centres provide provision in areas where there is none and once supply is put in, they find the demand is there after all.'Mr Fagan, a recent past president of Liverpool Law Society, says even solicitors with big firms want their small firm colleagues to survive, for the sake of the profession as a whole.

'Otherwise we will just become businesses,' he says.

'And it is not enough for the small firms just to hang on.

We need them to become thriving and successful,' he adds.Where does Mr Philips in Devon think the high street solicitor will be in ten years' time? He avoids the question - 'I'll be retired, thank you,' he says.IN-HOUSE LAWYERS ARE IN DEMAND AND WILL ENJOY FURTHER OPPORTUNITIES IN THE NEW DECADE, WRITES MATT BARNARDFor lawyers who work in-house, either for business in the private sector or for local authorities, the close of the decade offers an opportunity to catch their breath after a period of enormous change over the last ten years.

However, there is unlikely to be much time for reflection, as the tempo of change seems set to increase rather than slow down.At the start of the 1990s there were far fewer lawyers working for companies and they were often working alone and performing relatively unsophisticated roles in buying, and to a lesser extent, managing the external legal advisers.

It was not seen as a mature sector, and even in-house lawyers would acknowledge that the job was perceived as being less exciting and demanding than the equivalent position in the private sector.

In some ways it was viewed as a place where lawyers who were getting on could go out to pasture.However, the sector has a different character at the end of the 1990s, which can be seen in the speed at which it is growing.

'It's now the fastest growing sector of lawyers,' says Edward Smethurst, chairman of the Law Society's commerce and industry group.

'It grew by 22% last year and we are set to continue that growth.'There are now over 7,000 in-house solicitors with practising certificates and Mr Smethurst estimates that including those in-housers without practising certificates, the figure goes up to around 10,000.

However, it is not just the quantity of in-house lawyers that has increased, it is the quality.

As UK companies have realised the value and potential savings of having lawyers on board who really understand the business and its place within the industry, the demand for them has increased, whic h means that salaries have become far more competitive with even the City firms, and often offering better lifestyles and packages.

Not surprisingly this has attracted higher quality lawyers into the sector.

Mr Smethurst predicts that this trend will also increase.

He comments: 'I think it's going to follow the American model where general counsel sit at the right hand of the chief executive of every company and are tremendously powerful.'Looking to the US, where the in-house legal sector is considered to be more mature, gives some interesting pointers to the likely direction that the UK will go.

Norman Clark is the head of the management consultancy Altman Weil, which has offices both in the US and in London.

The firm specialises in advising the legal profession, and Mr Clark himself works with corporate counsel.

He says that after companies bring lawyers on board, they then begin to see how to use them in a more sophisticated way.Mr Clark explains: 'I see the increased focus of in-house counsel on strategic legal issues and less interest in the day-to-day legal work, particularly what we would call the commodity work - the kind of work that any law firm could do without company-specific knowledge, and could do more efficiently and more cost effectively than most in-house departments.'The more important and strategic the thinking required, the more of an advantage it is to have a lawyer on board who really knows the company, while other work will tend to get farmed out.

However, here the increased sophistication of the in-house lawyer also brings benefits to the company, as they are also more sophisticated purchases of legal services.Mr Clark continues: 'One of the things we are already seeing in North America is that in-house counsel are taking advantage of the competitive forces in the legal market.

They are driving harder bargains and there is a greater interest in the efficiency with which a law firm delivers its services.

One of the things we are seeing commonly now in tender offers is an interest in some sort of performance measure.'The increased importance of performance measures has also been felt in the local government sector.

During the years of the Conservative governments up until 1997, local government felt enormous pressure to take on the ethos of efficiency that was seen as part of the private sector.

However, Conservative administrations also saw advantages in a greater centralisation of services.

With the new Labour government there is also an emphasis on increased efficiency, but there has also been a shift towards increasing the responsibilities of local government and reconnecting them with the local community.This has meant that everyone in local government, including the lawyers, has been on somewhat of a roller-coaster ride, and is now having to cope with the challenges of new initiatives, ranging from increased work with the private sector in the form of private finance initiatives (PFIs), to practice measures for evaluating the efficiency of local services.

This has meant that local authorities have had to work with a wider range of public bodies, and brought more private practice lawyers into the process.Philip Thompson, chairman of the Law Society's local government group, thinks that there are going to be big changes to the way local authorities deal with its legal issues.

He says: 'I would have thought in five to ten years' time we're going to see local authorities pooling their legal services for a number of reasons.

Firstly in terms of scale, to provide a better service, and secondly to provide the sort of career structures that are going to be necessary to retain good lawyers.'No vision of the future is complete without at least a passing reference to the much-hyped Internet.

Undoubtedly much of it is pure hype, but it is also true that like the telephone before it, the Internet will have a major impact on the way business is done because it unblocks so many bottlenecks.Much of what lawyers do is the production of standard documentation, which as reported earlier this year (see [1999) Gazette, 6 October, 25-33) can be revolutionised by automatic production over the Internet.

In-house lawyers will be able to take advantage of this by applying this technology to company-specific documentation such as contracts.

This will also apply to the external legal advice which will mean that the legal market will become even more competitive, enabling in-house lawyers to get even better deals and reinforce the trend towards concentrating on the more interesting and challenging strategic role.

In-house lawyers, having fought to get the job where it is now, will reap the rewards in the next ten years with a decade of opportunity.CHANGES IN BRITISH WORKING SOCIETY HAVE ALTERED THE NATURE OF ACCIDENT CLAIMS, WRITHE MARTYN DAY AND JENNY KENNEDYThe 20th century has seen dramatic changes to the field of accident claims.

The pace of change has been increasing so that many of the features of the current system have only been in place during the last ten years.

Indeed, between the first edition of the book Personal Injury Practice that we co-authored in 1992 and the third edition that is scheduled for publication next month, the whole process of running claims, and the funding process had so fundamentally changed that the book had to be almost entirely re-written.This century has also seen dramatic changes to British working society, with its resulting impact on the world of accident law.

In the first three-quarters of the century the great majority of workers were either based in the manufacturing sector or in agriculture, with much of the workforce being unionised.

This resulted in the development of the union law firms and the great improvements that the resulting collective power was able to bring about to health and safety practices.

However, by the end of the century these two areas provide a minority of jobs and by far the greatest area of employment is now in the service sector where a far smaller proportion of the workforce is unionised.

Furthermore, much of the workforce is now based in the white collar world where health and safety issues are far more complex.

The late 1980s and early 1990s saw a spate of disasters in a wide variety of circumstances, including Hillsborough, the Marchioness, Zeebrugge and the Manchester air crash.

A quiet period that followed in mid-1990s perhaps led many of us in the injury world to take the view that the lessons from those disasters had been sufficiently learnt to ensure that these were of historic but not current interest.

The Paddington train crash (see [1999] Gazette, 10 November, 18-20) has reminded us all that the potential for disaster, with all the resulting injuries, remains just around the corner.

Therefore, while we would certainly hope that other lessons can be learnt from the recent crash, it remains likely that disasters will be an ongoing feature of accident-related law.With the increased crowding of the skies and even of space, perhaps the 21st century will see the first crash in space with all the subsequent debates about jurisdiction.

But as a result of the denigration of the British manufacturing sector, it seems unlikely that we will see mass claims similar to those recently in the headlines, such as the industrial deafness, vibration white finger and miners' lung disease.

However, because there are certain types of industrial illness that take many years to develop - mesothelioma is an example - it remains possible that there will be the odd group case arising from historic exposure still to come.This history of product liability and environmental group actions over the last 15 years does not bode well for the future of these claims.

The proposed cast limited nature of the legal aid budget available for group actions, the failure of the tobacco claims under the conditional fee scheme, combined with the resources at the defendant's disposal and the court's enthusiasm for allowing the defendants to put one procedural hurdle after another before the claimants in these actions, have all suggested that litigation in this field is fraught with difficulty.

However, with the development of increasingly sophisticated epidemiological techniques and the improvement of genetic finger printing, it may be that in the coming years and decades it will be easier to prove what exactly has been the cause of a particular cancer or other serious ailment.

For example, it has been said over the years that the radioactive waste emanating from British nuclear fuels facilities, particularly at Sellafield, has been the cause of many hundreds of deaths, but no death has ever specifically been tied to that radioactive waste.

The day when science has moved on sufficiently to enable us to be clear as to which death is being caused by a company's activities will be the day that society can truly come to terms with the cost of the environmental pollution.There will undoubtedly continue to be the normal accidents at work that occur for the blue collar working man and woman, in terms of people falling off scaffolding or being injured by moving parts of machinery.

However, with the move away from blue collar jobs, the great question for lawyers in this field is the extent to which white collar claims are going to be viable.

Immediately coming to mind are the issues of stress, bullying, passive smoking and repetitive strain injury.

Over the last six or seven years each has been proclaimed in the media to be on the verge of flooding the courts with claims.

But the reality has been rather different.

There are real problems with each sort of claim.

For passive smoking, only claims related to exacerbating a respiratory problem, such as asthma, appear to be realistic.

The difficulty with this type of claim is that it is not worth a great deal and it seems unlikely that an employer could have been held liable for the negligence in terms of having a no smoking policy prior to 1990.

Furthermore, it would appear that most employers have been relatively sensible about this issue, resulting in only a few cases coming forward.

Despite the recent couple of successes in relation to stress/bullying claims, it is quite clear that the courts are extremely wary about these claims and that it will only be in the most extreme of circumstances that an alleged victim of stress-related incidents at work is going to be able to be compensated.

Repetitive strain injury cases were again being held out in the mid-1990s as a major new area of injury work.

However, the claims are fraught with difficulties not least being the disagreement of the experts as to the existence of the illness.

All of these work-related cases are increasingly b eing hampered by the conditional fee agreement scheme.

With after-the-event insurance premiums doubling and even tripling in cost, and with insurers becoming tougher and tougher on law firms regarding their failure rates, each of the specialist practices is becoming increasingly wary of pursuing claims that are even remotely risky.

These sorts of office-related cases fall distinctly into that risky category and firms are being discouraged from pushing at the boundaries.

For all these reasons, we would be surprised to see these claims turning from being a trickle into a flood in the coming years.The last decade has seen a major expansion in claims involving post-traumatic stress.

This has related to anything from stress resulting from a serious accident, to claims by members of the emergency services involved in undertaking some of the most gruesome tasks in our society.

The prisoner of war cases being pursued in relation to the Second World War have been a clear indicator of how long the spectre of post-traumatic stress can hang over its victims.

We would fully expect to see this area of claim expand.

There is no question that anyone being forced into the position of intense emotional stress often incurred by members of the emergency services can result in serious post-traumatic stress.

Despite the fact that there is a mood afoot - especially espoused in the popular press - that these people should accept the trauma as a part of the job, it seems absolutely right that victims should be properly compensated if they find themselves devastated by what they have been involved in and what they have seen.

We would certainly anticipate the prospect of these sorts of claims expanding in the future and would also anticipate those responsible for the emergency services taking greater steps to ensure the damage caused by such incidents be minimised.

There seems little doubt that claims relating to motor accidents, slipping and tripping, or falling off ladders will continue well into the next century.

However, as society continually holds life more dearly and more effort is put into protecting the lives and health of each of us, we can anticipate that the number of accidents will reduce and therefore the level of claims will steadily diminish in the coming century.

We can also anticipate that with the changing of society's structures in terms of the type of work we undertake, this will again result in a significant reduction in the level of accidents in our society.