John Hawks has seven years on me as a solicitor and will, I suspect, remember charging scale fees for conveyancing (see letters, 19 November). By the time I qualified in 1980, changes were afoot. I now look back along the road we have travelled.

We are no longer a profession in the sense my father knew. We have squandered the respect in which we were held by the public on the altars of budgets, targets and timesheets, in honour of the god Profit. We have devalued our services. We have abrogated responsibility for leadership to a few stalwarts who do their best in impossible circumstances.

Whatever exclusive preserves of practice we once had have been given or taken away. I get letters from hopeful students wanting a training contract, lured by fanciful tabloid tales of fat cats. I have had six trainees in my time, but now I reply and question their logic. Why spend all that money qualifying and earning a pittance into the bargain, when others unqualified can do almost everything a solicitor can do with half the regulation and half (or less) of the insurance overhead?

When the Thatcher government decreed that competition was a ‘good thing’, the advent of licensed conveyancers saw us cut our conveyancing costs again and again. The lifeblood of a once proud profession ran down the drain there and then. The regular income previously enjoyed, that enabled you to do the odd job for Mrs So-and-so without charge; that enabled you to take on a meritorious case without raising interim bills on the basis of a timesheet (unheard of!); that enabled you to do many times the pro bono work you do now; that enabled you to do legal aid work at its usual uneconomic rate; all gone. We missed the trick. We competed on price, not on service.

Will writers, claims handlers, independent advisers – all have chipped away at our ‘professional’ preserves so that they really do not exist any more. Why would your average punter choose to buy legal services from a high street solicitor at a price born of stratospheric insurance, professional and other costs when he will be able to buy it from a trusted brand – also on the high street – for less? Because we are ‘independent’? Don’t make me laugh. This is the real world, not some rose-tinted yesteryear.

Now I have to be a businessman first, a lawyer second, and a solicitor by happenstance. So, if business demands that I pay a referral fee then that is what I will do – to compete and to survive. Removing the ability for a solicitor to pay a referral fee in controlled circumstances, in whatever sphere of practice, is only going to limit our ability to compete in a market where others do not fight with one hand tied behind their back.Michael R Moore,ML Law, Eastleigh, Hampshire