At the annual solicitors' conference in Birmingham last October, a delegate got up and described himself as a 'tubby little solicitor from Bournemouth'.

The same man once prosecuted murder cases in New Guinea.

John Edge, a lifelong conveyancer, is not a conventional person.

He relishes the chance to do things more conventional people might say he could not do, and should not bother trying.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons for the success of his conveyancing fee initiative, which has attracted more than 12,000 letters of support.One of the discoveries Mr Edge made as a young solicitor travelling back and forth through the jungles of Papua New Guinea is what he calls the 'human lie detector' test.

'A woman had been found dead on a garden rubbish heap,' Mr Edge recalls.

'The headman of the village was convinced it was a villager, because if you strayed out of your village in those days you would get your head chopped off.'In the midday sun he made all the males in the village between 15 and 45 take off their shirts and line up.

Then he walked down the line, put his hand on the heart of each man and said: "What do you know about this?"'When he got to one man, his heart was racing, his knees knocking and his body was running with sweat.

He confessed immediately.'Before leaving for New Guinea, Mr Edge had helped set up a new conveyancing office in Southampton for a firm based elsewhere in Hampshire.

Earlier he had advised the firm that a scheme to set up an office in Leigh on Solent was not a good idea, since the town consisted only of 'six people and a couple of dogs'.Mr Edge describes himself as 'working class and proud of it' - he was brought up in a two up, two down in Ladywood, Birmingham.

He started work as a clerk in a local law firm, and then managed to retain his salary level of £7 a week when he began articles.

(The going rate for an articled clerk was £2 a week.)Earlier, while study ing law in the city, at a college that has now become part of the University of Aston, Mr Edge met his wife Sally, who was studying sociology.

After her husband qualified she was offered a place on a postgraduate course in Southampton, and he decided to relocate there too, on the grounds that 'there was more to life than Birmingham'.Mr Edge's initial posting to New Guinea was as part of a team advising the government on constitutional matters.

It was followed by a year touring the villages with defence counsel and a judge.On his return from the tropics, Mr Edge started his own practice near the centre of Bournemouth where he was joined by Desmond Leyden and David Ellis.

His wife became a tutor in social work at Southampton University.In common with other conveyancers, Mr Edge blames the collapse of conveyancing fees not so much on the abolition of the solicitors' monopoly over conveyancing and the arrival of licensed conveyancers, as on the lifting of advertising restrictions.'Advertising took a lot of time to make an impact', he says, 'partly because it took solicitors a lot of time to realise they could advertise, but also because of the property boom.

The rot really set in around 1989 to 1990.

'New pressure began to come from estate agents phoning around for quotes.

Once you have a firm in an area which does conveyancing at uneconomic rates, it affects all the firms in that area.'One further effect of the slump in the property market was some property dealings by Mr Edge, separate from his legal practice, led to him entering an individual voluntary arrangement.

The IVA later featured in a front page article in The Lawyer.'I deplore this clumsy attempt to derail the conveyancing fee initiative,' Mr Edge says, emphasising that his legal practice is completely unaffected.Mr Edge says he launched his conveyancing fee initiative out of a sense of anger and frustration - 'anger at the situation in which the profession found itself and frustration about the fact that nobody else was doing anything about it'.He explains: 'The strength of the conveyancing fee initiative is that it contains the only true "snap shot" of the way the profession is feeling, not only about the conveyancing issue but about its attitude to Law Society council members and the professional body generally.'For years both Law Society staff and council members have told the profession that a return to any enforceable scale of conveyancing fees would be thwarted by the Office of Fair Trading.

The Singleton opinion obtained by Anthony Bogan has shown that this is not the case.

Mr Edge reserves his harshest condemnation for the building societies.

'It is both absurd and obscene that lenders cynically expect solicitors to collect the lenders' legal fees from buyers, knowing full well that the present market will not support such fees.

It is equally obscene when lenders then go looking for compensation from either the Solicitors Indemnity Fund or the compensation fund if things go wrong.

'I am not impressed by the bullying threats of some lenders to "take the work in house" or set up a specialist panel of solicitors.

I do not think they will be willing to risk both the wrath of the profession and of consumers by restricting which solicitors can act for lenders.'Mr Edge says that on the contrary, building societies could gain a lot by 'coming out' and announcing they will pay solicitors for the services they provide.'The first lender that grasps the nettle and publicly states that it will pay its solicitors legal fees will gain not only the respe ct and gratitude of the profession, but will seize a massive marketing advantage.' In other words, Mr Edge says, solicitors will be more likely to refer work to that building society in the future.

Mr Edge's initiative, launched in August, originally called for guideline fees enforced by a practice rule.

When it became clear that a change to the indemnity rules (see p.16) might be an equally effective way to achieve the same goal, Mr Edge was quick to support this route in its place.

Now, with the Society's council preparing to vote next week on a motion calling for guideline fees backed up by a change in the indemnity rules, Mr Edge has thrown his whole weight behind the motion backed by president Martin Mears and vice-president Robert Sayer.Whatever the future holds for conveyancing, there are more than a few solicitors who will always be glad a 'tubby little solicitor from Bournemouth' launched his conveyancing fees initiative.1996