An alleged £500,000 antiques fraud trial, in which a potter was accused of producing fake 18th century pottery, made history earlier this year at Knightsbridge Crown Court.Not because of the pots, but because 33-year-old Jo Cooper became the first solicitor with the higher courts qualification to appear in a Crown Court jury trial.That was in February, just after Mr Cooper had been awarded the post-rights-of-audience-watershed qualification.

By the end of April, he had become the first solicitor advocate to appear in the Court of Appeal, in R v Courtney Manyou, an appeal against sentence for offences of reckless and wanton driving.The news that the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Taylor, had issued a practice direction barring solicitors from appearing in anything other than just a gown and bands when acting as advocates came as a great disappointment to the former Bindman & Partners trainee.The let-down was partly due to the £350 he had spent on a spanking new wig, which he had carefully broken in by kicking it around his back garden: 'I had to give it an extra eight years of wear overnight.'Ironically, however, Mr Cooper is as anti-wig as the Lord Chief Justice himself.

'I would rather that none of us wore wigs,' he says.

'But, having said that, I am a multilateralist, and if the Bar are not willing to give theirs up, I think it is right for all of us to wear them.'The interests of justice require that everybody in court wear the same thing if we are all equally and appropriately qualified for doing the advocacy.'Mr Cooper was supported in his stand by the Solicitors Association of Higher Court Advocates, which, until the recent practice direction, had recommended to its members that all of those qualified under the new regime should wear wigs unless asked not to.A former secretary of the socialist lawyers' Haldane Society, Mr Cooper did PPE as a first degree at Oxford followed by an MPhil in criminology at Cambridge.

Sandwiched between that were the common professional and the Law Society final examination.The Bristol-born advocate's two years at King's Cross firm Bindmans proved the perfect springboard for a freelance career.'I liked the approach that they took at Bindmans, and the quality of their work was and is excellent.

That is a very good role model to have.'After going freelance I was, to start with, protected by the wing of the firm, who did use fr eelance advocates, so it was not a particularly brave thing to do at that time in my career, although there were few people doing defence agency work.'You are able to do the full range of work about six months after qualifying, though you will do the simple end of the repertoire at about that time.

Thereafter, people will give you what they think you are competent to do.'He claims that solicitors going into higher courts advocacy work will have had a better grounding than novice barristers: 'As a solicitor, you are already well familiar with criminal procedure and that gives you a big start.'The freelance way of life also has its obvious advantages: Mr Cooper can take three months out each year to recharge his batteries and travel.

He doubtless earns the breaks, as his past casework reads like a recent history of civil unrest: Broadwater Farm, the 1990 poll tax riot in Trafalgar Square, anti-apartheid cases and anti-Nazi demonstrations outside the BNP headquarters in Welling, to name but a few.Public order law is a field of growing activity - hunt saboteurs and new-age travellers being the government's most recent targets in the Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill.'A lot of public order law from the defence side is putting individual acts back into the context that makes them if not justifiable, at least understandable,' he explains.

'And a large part of the criminal prosecution enterprise is to isolate individual defendants from the context which informs their actions.'Increasingly, defence solicitors are having to mirror the collective resources of their prosecution adversaries.

'It is often helpful for defence solicitors to get together to share what resources they have, to try to match the approach that the prosecution takes in demonstration cases.'A good example is that of the Trafalgar Square Solicitors Group, which, representing 500 clients, was able to club together to win the right to analyse 100 hours of video material seized by the police.'But even then we were six to eight months late in coming up with the sort of analysis that the police have had three weeks after the event,' he says.One area of increasing concern is what he sees as a police tendency to arrest people as a means of crowd control.

He points out that large numbers of BNP protesters against a 'troops out of Ireland' march in north London last year were arrested with only a handful subsequently charged.'That is worrying, because unless people are charged and taken to court, there frequently is no opportunity to establish whether the routine exercise of these powers by police is lawful or not,' he argues.