No-one should mistake the significance of the paper the Law Society published last week - least of all the Lord Chancellor.

When he gave his much trailed speech to the Social Market Foundation in January, the Lord Chancellor argued that radical change was needed to the legal aid scheme if it was to continue to command public confidence.

He made it clear that his green paper would propose cash-limiting the legal aid scheme for the first time.The Law Society agreed radical change is needed if legal aid is to maintain public confidence - in particular the eligibility limits must be restored so that those on low incomes can once again afford legal aid.

But cash-limiting is unacceptable because it would turn legal aid into a lottery.

The challenge for the Law Society was thus to develop an alternative to the Lord Chancellor's plans which should show how eligibility could be restored through making savings on cases now covered by legal aid, without imposing crude cash limits.The consultation paper published last week - 'Design for the future' - starts to develop that alternative.A few simple principles got it underway.

The legal aid fund provides a significant part of the income of the legal profession and it is important to the Society to maintain that.

However, the legal aid fund does not exist for the benefit of lawyers.

It exists for the benefit of members of the public with legal problems.

The best way to achieve our aims is to ensure that the fund serves as many members of the community as possible and that it does this as cost-effectively as possible.I believe we have recognised those principles for a long time but have been slow to give public expression to them.

Implementing them demands a radical look at the way all the players in the legal aid field do their bit - and this includes lawyers.

For too long we have taken it for granted that our established practices are the best way of working and must be defended at all costs.

One aim of the paper is to make us all look at these attitudes and decide whether or not they need changing in order to make the best use of the funds available for legal aid.A policy that has been much to the forefront in recent years is that clients should have complete freedom of access to the solicitor of their choice.

In the context of legal aid this translates into a demand that any solicitor who chooses to do so should be able to offer legal services to clients under the legal aid scheme.

This policy has sometimes led to wasted legal aid funds, problems for the profession and claims for professional negligence giving another boost to the contribution which we all pay to the Solicitors Indemnity Fund.For this reason among others the paper takes a tentative look at the free for all policy of firms carrying out legal aid work.

The paper's starting point is not 'Should the policy be changed?' but 'Is there evidence that the policy should be changed?' It is easy to assume that solicitors on the Law Society's medical negligence panel might carry out medical negligence work better than those without this qualification.

A similar assumption might be made about franchised firms carrying out, for example, welfare benefits work.However, there is no evidence to demonstrate this link exists.

The reason is, of course, that franchising and the medical negligence panel have not been with us for very long.

The paper asks if research should be carried out to see if the link exists.Another area of practice that the paper looks at is the number of lawyers who are used to carry out a particular task.

The paper asks whether there are occasions when advocates can manage at court without a clerk, to take one example.

If some savings can be made so that more clients can be represented under the legal aid scheme is this not to the good of clients, the legal aid fund and lawyers?One area of practice which we do not entirely control is fee collection.

Speculative fee work has been made very difficult by British Waterways Board v Norman and other judicial decisions.

Conditional fees are just about to embark on their stormy passage through the Lords.

All the opposition seems to come from the Bar or former members of the Bar.

Who are they protecting? Is their obstruction consumer protection or professional protectionism? I can understand the discomfort caused by the thought that the Bar might carry out work and receive no fee.

Many solicitors will feel the same concern.

I doubt whether this would cause much anxiety to the members of the public who the opponents of contingency fees seek to protect.Contingency fees are of relevance to legal aid expenditure because they have the potential to create considerable savings for the fund.

The paper suggests a way in which they might be blended with legal aid and asks whether this should be attempted.The paper recognises that the cost of litigation is considerably influenced by factors outside lawyers' control.

It makes sensible suggestions for improvements in court procedure, and for increased use of mediation and alternative ways of dealing with fraud and less serious criminal allegations.

These parts of the paper may well not be too contentious for the legal profession.When we began work on our paper, we tried to look at every sacred cow of Law Society legal aid policy, with the aim of asking ourselves about each and every one of them.

Where necessary, we have asked the profession to consider whether those sacred cows genuinely continue to represent an important principle, or whether - in modern circumstances - we should change our approach.

The verdict on the paper might be that it is radical but restrained.

I hope it will start a debate in the profession which may enable us to take the legal aid scheme with us into the 21st century.