A question which is often directed at law firms in the regions is: what can they do to stop their clients slipping off to the City firms when they need advice on the big-ticket work? At the heart of the question is a metropolitan bias that will no doubt raise the hackles of many a lawyer at leading firms outside the capital.Perhaps the question should be how those City firms can protect themselves against regional firms poaching their clients, suggests Quentin Poole, the managing partner at the Birmingham firm Wragge & Co.

Wragges is, in its own words, a national firm 'which happens to be based in Birmingham'; more than 65% of its income comes from outside the midlands and international income accounts for 25%.It has been another good year for the firm, which has grown on average by 25% a year for the past five years.

'We've not done that by attracting work from other regional firms, but by attracting work traditionally done in London,' Mr Poole points out.Likewise, Nigel Haynes, the head of the commercial department at regional firm Shoosmiths & Harrison, turns the question on its head by asking how the London firms can keep their clients from haemorrhaging away.

Of course, he concedes that anyone with 'any reality or pragmatism' will accept that certain types of transaction will always be done in the City.

But he adds: 'Equally, there are large chunks of work which aren't rocket science, but where we are much better equipped at delivering a high-quality service at a more co st-effective level, and where we're able to drive the costs down and keep the value up.'He reckons that the 'battle-ground' between London and the provinces is over semi-commoditised areas of work such as commercial property, and niche areas of expertise such as competition and intellectual property law.

And Mr Haynes maintains that it is a battle that the City firms are losing: 'I think they have enormous difficulty because they simply cannot compete with the technology-led firms.'Shoosmiths is a firm that prizes itself on innovation and reliance on cutting-edge IT, and it claims that it is this modern approach that will differentiate itself from traditional and stuffy London firms.

The City giants cannot trade on their reputations forever, he argues: 'I think the clients will be saying that it is not really for them.

They want something a bit younger, a bit more vibrant and something which fits in with a new technology way of doing things.'In the north-west earlier in the month, Edward Pysden, the solicitor chairman of lobby group Pro Manchester, called upon the local business community to buy their professional advisory services locally.

'The professional community in Manchester is the largest employer with more than 56,000 people, so there's no need to go to London for advice,' he told the group's annual dinner.Mr Pysden is a partner in Eversheds' Manchester office.

He reckons that many local businesses took that message to heart a long time ago as regards legal work.

When Pro Manchester was established 14 years ago it was a different story, he says, with much of the big legal work travelling down south.

But the arrival of truly national firms - such as Eversheds, Dibb Lupton Alsop and Addleshaw Booth & Co - has reversed that trend.

He claims that there is no way that many London firms can compete with their regional counterparts either on price or expertise.It is the same story in the north east, reckons John Flynn, the business development partner with Newcastle upon Tyne firm Dickinson Dees.

After 20 years in practice, he has identified two major trends in the local market - the amount of legal work has shot up and the high value and complex work is being drawn away from the City.

Work used to go to London because there were no local firms with the capacity to do it, he says.

Dickinson Dees only became a commercial practice 10 years ago, but he adds: 'We're probably bigger now at 400 people than Slaughter and May were even ten years ago'.On a smaller scale, last month four rival firms in Peterborough - Hunt & Coombs, Greenwoods, Hegarty & Co and Buckle Mellows - joined forces to offer a seamless service to new business coming into the city which otherwise might have gone to the London firms.

Quentin Bainbridge, the quality and business development manager at Hunt & Coombs, says the venture, called the Greater Peterborough Law Group, will act as a 'confederation of nation states'.

'We've stopped fighting each other for this little cake,' he says.

'What we want to do is group together and fight each other for a bigger portion of a bigger cake'.

He points to legal centres with established reputations, such as Leeds and Birmingham.

'We don't see why Peterborough shouldn't have as good a reputation,' he says.

'Our communications are excellent.

We can be in the City in under an hour, and we haven't got London prices'.Of course, there is work that is the preserve of the City firms.

Edward Pysden says the main problem in Manchester lies with merchant bankers who, with the odd exception, still use their chums in the City f or the £100 million-plus deals.

But he is not without hope.

'It's [a question] of educating them and giving them the confidence that they can actually get the service here in the regions,' he says.Wragges has spent a lot of time and money on researching whether it is viable to compete for investment bank work.

According to Quentin Poole, the firm has come to the conclusion that, on the whole, it is not worth the fight.

'There's a smaller and smaller group of magic circle firms which is really doing that serious investment bank work,' he says.

He reckons that banks such as Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan will have only two UK and US law firms on their panels and second-tier firms targeting that work are being squeezed out of the market.But Mr Poole contends that everything else is up for grabs and increasingly clients are looking outside the square mile.

'It costs two-thirds as much to produce an hour of law in Birmingham or Leeds as it does to produce an hour of law in London,' he says.

But it is not just price that is attracting the clients to the provinces.

He also argues that in the rush for the big firms to go global, they have forgotten their clients.

'They are obsessed with striking the next huge deal and they're not relationship orientated,' he argues.Many commentators maintain that the recent spate of press headlines about salary hikes and growing fees in the City has done firms outside the capital a great favour.

Edward Pysden says: 'It's good news for the regions if these people price themselves out of the market'.

John Pratt, the Birmingham managing partner at Pinsent Curtis, agrees: 'So long as the magic circle firms continue to charge what they charge we're going to continue acting for those clients, because they're going to want to use them as little as possible.'He sees inflated fees contributing to a more discerning client base which no longer instructs the magic circle firms for the whole job.

'They'll make use of them for a hostile take-over or a £100 million plus multi-national deal.

Everything below that - and quite a lot above that - we would expect to do,' Mr Pratt says.

Pinsent Curtis ranks as the eight largest firm in the country in terms of the number of quoted companies it has on its books.Shoosmiths' Nigel Haynes also says that clients are looking more critically at their legal budgets and asking themselves how much they actually need to leave with the City firms.

But there also persists the mentality that it is better to play safe and stick with the big firms from the more cautious members of the business world.Dickinson Dees' John Flynn also acknowledges the comfort factor that clients derive from the City firms.

'They did not spend hundreds of years building their brands for nothing,' he adds.

But he says that the level at which that comfort factor kicks in has been going up at an exhilarating rate over the past ten years.

His firm is currently acting for the transport company the Go-Ahead Group in the Ladbroke Grove Rail Disaster.It is a job that might have automatically fallen to a London firm a few years ago, he says, but not any more.

If clients instruct a particular firm on the big jobs, he says, it is not because they are cheaper than anyone else, but because they have a belief in that firm.