'Franchising is not going to go away,' insisted Steven Orchard, chief executive of the Legal Aid Board, last week, in the face of some of the most bitter criticism to date of the board's flagship project.He confirmed that his offer to the Law Society to find a compromise on the now infamous franchising contract held good.

And he was 'absolutely committed' to hammering out a deal satisfactory to both sides.

But agreement or no agreement, franchising is the future, and that is that as far as he is concerned.He dismissed as 'a non-runner' an alternative quality scheme which the Society has been considering.

This would be based on the practice management standards, implementation of which would be identified by a bespoke quality mark.But while quick to acknowledge the value of the PMS, Mr Orchard feels they are incapable by themselves of giving any assurance of a compe tent legal service.

'You need some way of getting at the service that is actually delivered to the client,' he said.But could that not be secured through membership of specialist panels? No, he does not think that would work at all.

'One of the problems with specialist panels is that they are an entry scheme - there is no ongoing assurance that the standards are being maintained.

You have to have some ongoing audit.'It is with this in mind that the board has invested so much energy in developing its 'transaction criteria' - a highly controversial checklist system of measuring quality which the Society maintains is 'light years away' from being ready for effective use.

Mr Orchard begs to differ.Indeed, the differences between the board and the Law Society will make agreement on the contract very difficult.

Casting his eye down the list of nine conditions put to the board by the Society, Mr Orchard can see some scope - subject to detail, he stresses - for concessions on the issues relating to monitoring.

And he is certain a suitable dispute resolution procedure to cover franchise rejections can be agreed.But he has no easy solution to the major problem of how to reconcile the board's wish to alter the franchising rules during the term of the first contract with the practitioner's desire for certainty.The difficulties of the negotiating task are compounded by the fact that relations with the Society are very sour at the moment.

Mr Orchard is furious at the way the Society has rounded on the board in public over the last three weeks.He took particular exception to a stinging speech delivered by the Vice-President, Charles Elly, to an audience of legal aid practitioners in Nottingham on 23 April.

In this, Mr Elly accused the board of botching franchising, of creating 'a first class disaster area of a modestly promising idea'.Mr Orchard freely acknowledges that the board has made mistakes on franchising and he volunteers two areas in particular where its judgment has been off, and its approach heavy-handed.The first concerns rejections of work during the monitoring process.

He concedes that in some cases perfectly good work has been rejected in error.

'I agree that that has happened.

I regret it and I apologise for it,' he says.In other cases he accepts that the board has been too rigid, rejecting work which has very little wrong with it.

Efforts are being made to arrive at a consistent system to ensure that 'we don't reject silly things that we could put right ourselves'.The second issue on which Mr Orchard comes out with his hands up is the controversial green form cost guidelines.

He accepts that individual area offices have been treating them more as a rule than a guide and that this has caused great irritation to practitioners attempting to give their clients a professional service.

He is happy to go back to the drawing board, consulting with practitioners to get it right.Tales abound about the board rejecting legal aid applications for palpably daft reasons.

Mr Orchard smiles indulgently at the 'legend' of the application which was rejected because the practitioner's name strayed outside the box provided.

'Well, I would love to see that application.

I hear it quoted all over the place but no one has actually shown it to me.' His tone and a broad grin says it all.Some of the most deep-seated worries about franchising relate to the Lord Chancellor's future plans.

In its current form the Lord Chancellor has the power to abandon franchising at any time.

This, practitioners suspect, is to enable him to usher in c ompetitive price tendering (CPT) easily in the future.

There is also much confusion about where the board stands on CPT.The reason for the confusion, explains Mr Orchard, is that no proposals of any kind have been drawn up on CPT and therefore there is nothing on which to have a position.

'The words competitive price tendering get bandied around as if there were a common agreed understanding of precisely what they mean.' But he feels sure that to introduce CPT of the kind most feared by the profession - a crude auction of legal services - primary legislation would be needed.In any case, Mr Orchard detects a 'significant shift' in the language used by the Lord Chancellor most recently in relation to CPT, suggesting to him that perhaps practitioners are getting unnecessarily concerned.But aside from price competition, Mr Orchard is interested in looking at new ways in which legal services could be delivered so as to give the board more control.

He points, for example, to the potential for fraud going undetected where, as at present, there are 1.7 million individual green forms coming into the board every year.'There has got to be a better way and we are going to have to think very seriously about whether we continue to operate on an individual green form basis.' One possibility is block contracts in exchange for an agreed price.

He stresses that this does not necessarily mean price competition; it could be done through negotiation.As far as pay and other rewards are concerned, Mr Orchard says he is keen to achieve 'a continuing and accelerating differentiation' between franchised and non-franchised firms.

With this in mind he has put proposals to the Lord Chancellor aimed at improving cash flow.But do the Lord Chancellor's recently announced plans to standardise fees for civil legal aid not throw an enormous spanner in the works?'I believe that if the standard fee scheme is to proceed, it is absolutely essential that it would recognise the difference between franchised and non-franchised firms,' he answers.Mr Orchard has repeatedly made this point to the Lord Chancellor but is confident that Lord Mackay is also keen to reward better quality.

Practitioners would marvel at his faith in this regard.Whether the board is in a position to offer signed contracts in August as planned depends on the progress of talks with the Society.If they break down, will the board appeal direct to the 1000-plus firms in the hope that they might sign up anyway? Mr Orchard side-steps the question.

'I am committed at this stage to negotiations with the Society,' is all he will say, adding: 'I do not believe it is beyond the wit of man for us to hammer out these problems.'