The prospect of solicitors feeling forced to bid for block contracts for legal aid work has set the cat among the pigeons.

As with legal aid franchises, fear of being left out in the cold when block contracts are introduced has sparked pre-emptive activity in a profession not noted for its enthusiasm for forward planning in business.

Barristers are also concerned for their futures.

Within the block contract scheme, fund-holding solicitors would have to pay for advocacy in cases from their own budgets.

Tighter profit margins could put solicitors under pressure to bring in solicitor-advocates or to use more junior counsel than they would otherwise have done.

At One King's Bench Walk (One KBW), the chambers of James Hunt QC has decided not to sit and wait for this to happen.

It is soon to begin a pilot scheme with two firms of solicitors to test how advocacy services might work under block contract conditions.

The firms are Park Woodfine in Bedford and the James Smith Partnership in Skegness, Lincolnshire.

Talks continue with a third firm, but it has not yet signed up.

Under the six-month pilot, the chambers will agree to provide all barristers' services required under the firms' block contracts for a fixed price.

The parties will agree figures according to their estimates of the nominal cost of the work to be done.

Initially, the pilot will be for family work only, but could be expanded and could also continue until tendering for block contracts is introduced.

The Legal Aid Board has said its own block contracting pilot for solicitors will not begin until it appoints researchers and that this is likely to happen in October or November 1996.

'What we are doing is splitting off part of the risk from the solicitor [so] that one of the highest risks to the solicitor of block contracts will become one of the lowest,' said Peter Bennett, practice manager at One KBW and the mastermind of the scheme.

The terms of the agreement have already been drawn up, although this is a dry run, with no cash changing hands.

'It's an excellent opportunity to use a hypothetical scenario and if mistakes -- such as under-estimating of costs -- are made, it is not a catastrophe,' said James Smith, head of the partnership bearing his name.

The project was due to begin this month but it now looks as if it will begin in October at the earliest.

Sticking points that had still to be worked out have centred around two issues, said Mr Bennett.

First, there had to be agreement on how individual representations within certain work types should be linked to barristers of appropriate seniority.

And, secondly, there was the question of building flexibility into the agreement.

'It's a matter of how we would cope with major changes in the way the solicitors' firm would wish to conduct litigation such that it would affect the need for counsel.' The attractions of such an agreement for solicitors are obvious.

Mr Bennett cited a senior partner who said to him: 'I am not prepared to accept a fixed income and variable costs.

If have to, I'll employ two solicitor-advocates.

know that won't be a good service but I'll face the consequences of poor outcome measures at the end of the contract because that's better than bankruptcy during the contract.' Unsurprisingly, the project has generated considerable curiosity at the Law Society, the Bar Council and the LAB.

Russell Wallman, the Society's head of professional policy, said the obvious risks inherent in the pilot scheme 'show ed up the massive problems for all concerned that block contracting would create'.

Moreover, he said, it was 'difficult to reconcile with a collective arrangement of this sort' the government's stated aim in its legal aid green paper that it was preferable that solicitors consider the right choice of advocate in every case.

Roger Smith, director of the Legal Action Group, said: 'In its long term consequences it will mean that solicitors will look harder at providing their own advocacy services, which would be cheaper.' Solicitor Rae Levene, the Park Woodfine partner involved in the negotiations, rejected the notion that solicitor-advocates would represent better value.

'In a busy practice like ours, we don't have time to do our own advocacy.

It is more efficient to use barristers.' Ultimately it could be competitiveness between barristers' chambers that becomes the issue, according to Mr Bennett.

In a scenario where there were several well-organised sets of barristers all tendering for work under a single block contract, his chambers would have to consider what it stood to lose from losing out.

'The world that is going to be out there once contracts come in is so hard that there could be a case for saying "we've got to take a chance with a low bid".'