One of the benefits of working in Jyoti Munsiff's 19th floor office in Shell's south bank tower is the nightly spectacle of the sun setting on St Paul's Cathedral.Miss Munsiff was born in Bombay in 1947 and came to England as a baby.

Last month, she took on the mantle of chairman of the Law Society's Commerce and Industry Group, a quarter of a century after she first joined Shell.'At that time, the next person in age to me was 22 years my senior - they had had a policy up until they recruited me of not taking on anybody under the age of 30.'The company has been well rewarded for what must have been something of a leap in the dark during those unenlightened days before equal opportunities were the law - a 14-hour day is typical for the former Burlington Grammar School pupil.'It has been very hard work - certainly the first 15 to 17 years required quite exceptional personal commitment and an insensitivity to the initial resistances,' she says.During that time she travelled seven months of the year and was never in one place longer than three weeks, working in 24 different countries in a legal capacity.Headhunters draw near at the whiff of this sort of track record - but with no success to date.

'When I have been headhunted, there has always been something that has kept me with Shell - and it isn't the money!' she jokes.

'I suspect it's something to do with the quality of the work.'While Shell workers do not march into an auditorium singing the company song each morning, there is some-thing distinctly Calvinistic about the 90-year-old Anglo-Dutch petroleum company.

Its Waterloo blockhouses are a cross between a government department and the offices of a deeply powerful MegaCorp.Indeed, Shell is a relatively complex organisation: Miss Munsiff is company secretary for the public listed company, the Shell Transport and Trading Company plc, and senior legal adviser to the Shell International Petroleum Company, which provides services to the geographically divided operating companies, for example 'Shell Thailand'.On top of that, she is responsible for the company secretarial department looking after 90 UK registered companies and heads the group of lawyers looking after corporate and financial matters, like acquisitions and disposals.'We do consider the UK as a sound legal, jurisdictional location and, wherever possible, we try to ensure that our contracts are subject to English law - although increasingly many countries look upon it as an issue of national pride to have contracts governed by their own national law,' she explains.Shell, she admits, has been able to take advantage of tough economic times to call the shots when it comes to instructing outside law firms to take on work.'The recessionary conditions of the past few years have made private practitioners much more realistic in their approach to servicing and charging corporate clients,' Miss Munsiff believes.

'But, in instructing outside lawyers, we require of them no more than is required of us as a legal department, which is to provide a budget and to have transparency in connection with who is doing what, for how much and for how long.'She is only too aware of the propensity of some law firms simply to provide - and charge for - advice to fit the available space, irrespective of whether the client needs or wants it.'What distinguishes a good private practice from a bad one is the ability to exercise some discipline and insight into what is required and what is essential for the job in hand, and not to go into "la la land" in the provision of extraneous and unnecessary advice,' she says.It is the solicitors in the employed - some would prefer the term 'business' - sector whom she now represents who have plenty to offer the profession, Miss Munsiff asserts.'Solicitors in business bring an experience of management - being able to delineate what is the core business for which advice has to be provided and the evaluation of the relative costs.

In other words, a management perception, which I believe private practice is only now very painfully beginning to acknowledge is essential for the running of their practices.'One area where employed solicitors will be keeping a close eye on developments is rights of audience, denied to those working outside private practice law firms earlier this year on what some would say was a technicality.

Miss Munsiff will be pressing hard for parity between the two sectors.'There will be anxiety in any situation which seeks to discriminate and distinguish one group of solicitors from another,' she says.Miss Munsiff is a follower of the Baha'i faith, a sort of religious Esperanto founded in 19th century Persia whose message is one of the unification of mankind and of all fundamental religions being equal.She says its universal flavour has helped guide her through the multiple challenges of working for a large international organisation.A second pillar has been the support provided by her parents, through whose efforts she became the first Indian woman to qualify as a solicitor.'They insisted that I have a qualification.

In their own lives they had seen how fortunes can change and felt that, since they were not wealthy, the greatest security they could offer me was to support me in acquiring a professional qualification that would enable me to stand on my own two feet.1994