The clash between the government and the House of Lords over the fate of Lord Falconer's constitutional reforms felled more than an acre or two of trees over the last week.

The Daily Mail (10 March) attacked the government for its 'constitutional vandalism in tearing down institutions that have protected our freedoms for centuries.

This was a back of the envelope job, hastily scribbled down as part of his [Tony Blair's] last botched Cabinet reshuffle.'

Writing in the London Evening Standard under the headline 'Making a proper Charlie of the law', columnist Anne McElvoy gave the Lord Chancellor short shrift - labelling him 'the rumpled eminence' who 'sits not so much on the woolsack, as atop a mountain of muddle'.

Ms McElvoy suggested that Lord Falconer 'still has some difficulty in articulating why all this upheaval is worth it for judicial reform.

Few people are that worked up about it.'

The Daily Mirror, by contrast, gave credit for what the government was trying to do, but not for how it went about it.

'The position of Lord Chancellor is defended by the Tories for being an ancient office,' it said.

'Ancient it certainly is.

It belongs to a different era and has no place in the modern world.

Yet these sensible reforms were rushed out by the government without consultation or much thought.'

The Times was also more favourably inclined towards the reforms, suggesting that Lord Woolf, the Lord Chief Justice, 'cannot quite make up his mind whether he is a liberal reformer or the shop steward for the only trade union in the country whose members wear wigs and not hard hats or cloth caps'.

Meanwhile, the publication of Sir David Clementi's consultation paper on legal services reform fell largely on deaf ears, with the main exception coming in the shape of the Financial Times (9 March).

In a leader, the paper suggested that the arguments against replicating the Financial Services Authority in the legal profession were 'compelling'.

'Apart from the bureaucracy and cost of a statutory system, there are advantages in arrangements that commit the lawyers to maintaining professional standards,' it said.

The newspaper suggested that it would also be undesirable to subordinate the profession to a statutory body on the basis that 'unlike other professions, lawyers must be independent of government and free to challenge its actions'.

Plumping for an oversight board with professional bodies having to split regulation and representation, it called for independent members to dominate the regulatory side.

'Only then would it be possible to rebut the accusations of an insiders' stitch-up,' it concluded.

The attack on the UK's 'compensation culture of blame, claim and gain' by ex-trade secretary Stephen Byers received substantially more coverage - not least his claim about 'greedy lawyers'.

'Money is being taken away from saving lives and educating our children to pay for a compensation system in which the real beneficiaries are the lawyers and accident management companies,' he suggested.

In an editorial headlined 'Byers is right: greedy lawyers are a curse', The Daily Telegraph (11 March) called for no-win, no-fee deals, 'which encourage frivolous litigation', to be scrapped, although it 'might anger those lawyers whose practice is built on ambulance-chasing'.

'Reversing what has become a profitable pursuit for unscrupulous lawyers and determined victims of accidents is bound to be a slow process,' it added, prompting irate letters from both the Law Society and the Bar Council.

Finally, and on an entirely separate note, the March edition of Estate Agency News published a letter from one of its readers, a certain Alan Howick of Essex agency Howick & Booker, under the headline '40 years on - and solicitors are still a pain!'

Mr Howick is clearly an angry man, having already written and had published in the same paper a critical letter about lawyers a couple of years ago.

Based on his 40 years in the estate agency business, he said 'we still have some "dinosaurian" solicitors who refuse point blank to talk to estate agents', adding that 'there is no passion, no desire to look after their clients' welfare...

Everyone is hanging on to the whims and temperaments of a so-called professional person who could not care less.'

The image of passionate estate agents all over the UK is an uncomfortable one.

Be that as it may, when the legal profession is attacked by estate agents over its standards, is it time for lawyers to pack up and go home?

See Letters, [2004] 18 March, page 16

Philip Hoult