The outlook for the high street practitioner is considerably more depressing than it was 12 months ago.

However, if the Law Society shows the necessary leadership then hopefully more of us will survive than the 70% predicted to be in business in two years' time by last year's Coopers & Lybrand survey.

Ways to reverse this decline in the number of sole practitioners must be found and the President of the Law Society must give top priority to the high street practice.

The Society must move in the following directions.CONVEYANCINGJohn Edge's initiative to bring back fixed fees for conveyancing had considerable support from the profession in the high street.

The high fees charged by estate agents, which remain unchallenged, must be highlighted to counter any bad publicity that may arise from recommending guideline fees.It is likely that many firms which are reluctant to charge uneconomic rates but are forced to do so because of competition would be willing to peg their prices at a reasonable level if they could be assured that a reasonable number of other solicitors in their area would do the same.

Guideline fees must therefore be introduced as soon as possible.

No two solicitors will ever agree upon what is a fair and reasonable fee for work but assessment criteria do exist, otherwise the remuneration certificate procedure would be wholly inconsistent.

The hourly rates of those people doing the conveyancing work rather than merely the typing should be made known to the client.

It may also be necessary for the Solicitors Indemnity Fund to re-examine the ratio between solicitors and unqualified staff when calculating indemnity insurance premiums, so that the greater the number of unqualified staff employed, the higher the premium.It must also be possible for the Society to prevent solicitors from acting for commercial mortgagees without costs being agreed beforehand.

Among professionals, it is only solicitors who work for commercial companies, provide them with massive indemnity cover and are not then entitled to be paid by that company.

In most cases, surveyors and valuers have their fees paid by the lenders.

Solicitors are entitled to expect the same treatment.LEGAL AIDThe white paper on legal aid, which was published in July, contains what many sole practitioners feared.

Even if one acquires a legal aid franchise, there is no guarantee that the majority of the work will not still go to block contract providers.

Practices in the outlying suburbs and rural areas are going to be hard hit but it is the clients of those practices who are going to be severely prejudiced.

Practice rule 1.01 states that a client has the freedom to instruct a solicitor of his or her choice.

Those solicitors who accept work under the new legal aid provisions may be denying the public this right to choose and taking on the work against the client's interest.

The Society should publicise this point.PROBATEIt is likely that accountants will be able to set up probate departments in the very near future and the profession must be able to counter this.

To say that the only answer is to use customised software pre-supposes that, in the future, only specialist departments or firms will deal with limited areas of the law.

While general practice solicitors can in theory use such software, in practice their volume of work in each area is likely to be insufficient to cover the cost.

Many clients still wish to use a general practitioner solicitor; a point which seems to have been forgotten.

We need to make clients aware of what is involved in dealing with probate and the many tasks that solicitors are ideally suited to perform.

However, it would be difficult to achieve this without the Society demonstrating to the public that we have the edge over our competitors.TAX WORKThis is an area where we have lost out to accountants through our own apathy.

The introduction of tax self-assessment is an ideal opportunity for recovering some of this work and of getting new work from existing clients or new clients.Courses and seminars on this topic and generally in respect of trust work, tax planning and estate work for the private client or small business client must be given priority by the Society.PRACTICE MANAGEMENT STANDARDSAll practices should be encouraged to adopt the practices recommended in the practice management standards (PMS), although there should be no stigma attached in any way to those firms which do not proceed to full accreditation by the Society.

Guidelines and advice need to be issued and the cost of implementation must be kept to the barest minimum.

One very welcome initiative which now needs to be given prominence by the Society is the new high street starter kit, which includes a software programme for accounts, time costing and word processing complying with the PMS criteria that the Society has devised for the small practice.

The purchase costs of such software must be kept at a viable level for the high street practitioner.