PRACTICE IN THE REGIONThe Law Society's annual statistical report 1997, based on data from the Solicitors Indemnity Fund, showed:-- There are 581 firms employing 3,956 solicitors in Yorkshire and Humberside (including north Lincolnshire and Kingston upon Hull) and 397 firms employing 1,837 solicitors in the north (Northumberland, Cumbria, Durham and Tyne & Wear).-- The number of firms in the north and Wales rose by 1% between 1996 and 1997, compared to a 3.1% rise for London and a 1.1% rise for the south.-- There are five firms in Yorkshire and Humberside and two firms in the north with 26 or more partners compared to 49 in the City of London.-- There are 205 sole practitioners in Yorkshire and Humberside and 169 in the north compared to 67 in London.ROBERT VERKAIK GOES TO YORKSHIRE AND FINDS THAT THE 'BIG SIX' FIRMS IN LEEDS ARE SECOND ONLY TO THOSE OF LONDON'S SQAURE MILERipon race course is not only a wonderful showcase for some of the finest thoroughbreds in the Pennines region but also the best place to rub shoulders with the great and the good of Yorkshire's legal community.For many years now the 'big six' Leeds law firms -- Eversheds, Pinsent Curtis, Hammond Suddards, Dibb Lupton Alsop, Addleshaw Booth & Co and Walker Morris -- have packed Ripon's hospitality boxes with clients from all over the north east, and sometimes much further afield.

The generous servings of champagne, the quality of the canapes and the warmth of the welcome have become an integral part of the county's social scene.

Many a canny Yorkshire businessman, with no intention of changing his current lawyers, has walked the length of the hospitality corridor without skipping a single box.Peter McCormick, senior partner of six-partner media, sport and entertainment specialists McCormicks says: 'If you are a corporate client in this part of the world you can live a very nice life just responding to invitations to be entertained.' McCormicks's own clients get to enjoy an afternoon watching Leeds United where, Mr McCormick is a director of the club.Extravagant corporate hospitality means only one thing -- competition for work.

With 4,500 lawyers and four practices laying claim to national law firm status, Leeds is second only to the City of London in terms of lawyers per square mile.Andrew Gosnay, head of banking at Pinsent Curtis, describes the competition as 'healthy'.

'We are all better for it and everybody is doing very well,' he says.

Alan Baker, president of the Leeds Law Society, says Leeds firms have always been 'highly competitive'.

But Mr McCormick maintains the reality is that competition is now 'cut throat'.

Leeds, he says, is not a city where one will find gentlemanly agreements regulating the poaching of clients and staff.

The 'big six' are not a 'magic circle' happy to tend their own patches, keeping the smaller firms at bay.

Because competition also comes direct from London, the Yorkshire firms regard gentlemen's agreements as a bit of a luxury.

'You'll find head hunters alive and well here,' adds Mr Gosnay.

However, Mr McCormick says it goes well beyond healthy competition.

'The "big six" are each trying to out-do each other in terms of fee-income and numbers of partners,' he says.

'There are very few complimentary remarks passed by one big firm about another.' The ferocity of the competition, says Mr McCormick, is due to the realisation that although Leeds is a legal success story there must be a limit to the amount of work the region can produce.Competition was at its most fierce at the beginning of the 1990s, during the worst part of the recession, when a rumour began spreading across the city that one of the big six was facing insolvency.

There was no truth in this but the slandered firm lost significant business as a result of the rumour.

Determined to trace the origin of the story, the partners of the injured firm finally identified the source as two partners working for one of the other 'big six' firms.Last year the Law Society finally agreed to allow the 4,500 lawyers now operating out of Leeds to elect their own Council member, Roger Ibbotson of Addleshaw Booth & Co, to represent their interests.

This was partly in recognition of the fact that the 'big six' are all ranked within the top 50 UK law firms.

Leeds Law Society president, Alan Baker, says the situation had become absurd.

'We were the biggest city [in terms of] numbers of lawyers outside London and we didn't have a constituency,' he says.

The electoral change and the new Mercantile Court, opened in July last year, is going some way towards pacifying Leeds lawyers aggrieved that they have been neglected for too long.

Now other leading legal figures are also beginning to sit up and take notice of Leeds as a significant legal centre.

The Lord Chancellor's Department minister, Geoff Hoon, attended the Young Solicitors Group annual conference last year in Leeds and appeared in a question and answer session.Next month Lord Woolf will be meeting members of the Leeds Law Society's civil litigation sub committee.

Mr Baker hopes that this will be a chance for Leeds lawyers to express some of their concern over recent reforms.

'We do hope we can influence him,' he says.

'We will be putting a whole range of questions to him, including practice rule 6, SIF indemnity and the split of the Law Society's roles as trade union and regulator.'Traditionally, Leeds has been the home of the building society.

Most of the 'big six' have grown up on the back of the servicing of these institutions.

But today there is a much broader base of work.

So much so that in the past ten years, four of the six have opened successful offices in London to challenge the City firms in their own back yard.

Mr Baker explains: 'The credibility gap [vis-a-vis London] with regard to corporate work has narrowed considerably and continues to do so because so many deals are being done up here.

People realise they don't have to trot down the M1 any more.' Instead it is London lawyers who are now using the M1 to head north for what the Leeds firms emphasise high profile commercial work and a better quality of life.During the end of the 80s, as the country entered a recession, many up and coming City lawyers were being told they would have to wait for partnership.

Some were not prepared to hang on and instead plumped for jobs in the regi ons where they were welcomed with open arms.

Mr Baker says: 'We took on an awful lot of good people from London.'Pinsents has particularly benefited from the migration.

Mr Gosnay was with Cameron Markby Hewitt before he moved to Leeds.

Last year banking partner John Cleland joined Pinsents in Leeds from Simmons & Simmons, and in the last few weeks assistant solicitor Tim Jarvis has joined from Slaughter and May.

'Because we compete with many of the City firms,' says Mr Gosnay, 'we often find our old colleagues are on the other side.'The Leeds market continues to grow and law firms position themselves to meet the challenge.

Addleshaw Booth moved to new premises at the end of the year and Walker Morris is to take on a new suite of offices across the road from its King Court headquarters.

Mr Gosnay comments: 'It would be difficult not to do well in the current climate.' Pinsent's Leeds banking department had its best ever year in 1997 advising on £2.2 billion worth of deals, including twenty buy-outs and buy-ins.

Mr Baker says: 'The doom and gloom that one hears about in other parts of the country just does not seem to have happened up here.'MIKE YUILLE FINDS LOCAL SOLICITORS AT THE FOREFRONT OF RECENT ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL REGENERATION IN NEWCASTLE UPON TYNEThe 1970s movie Get Carter, featuring Michael Caine blasting his way through Geordie gangland with a shotgun under his raincoat, portrayed Newcastle upon Tyne as a grim, gritty place in a state of permanent recession.

A cliche perhaps, but not without a grain of truth.

Deprived of its shipbuilding and coalmining industries, the region floundered for many years.

This branch economy appeared severed from the economic trunk of Britain.

Its plight ranking low in the priorities of Westminster, the north east was seemingly left to sort out its problems by itself.

And that is what has happened.Local businesses, with solicitors very much to the fore, have successfully regenerated the economy, partly by buying goods and services locally wherever possible.

Solicitors have played their role through mutual co-operation, and by winning back much of the legal business which would otherwise have gone to firms in Leeds or London.A key factor has been a scheme called the Services Challenge, run with the help of the Northern Business Forum, a regional business agency.

The scheme involves lawyers, accountants, stockbrokers and other local professionals.

Its aim is to help professional services firms raise profile and increase market share.

'The lawyers have been pretty active in it,' says David Foster, Newcastle Law Society president and a partner at commercial firm Watson Burton.

The idea was for the scheme to mirror one set up by the forum for industry, called the Manufacturing Challenge.

The forum's central aim is to 'make the north east one of the top ten regional centres within ten years,' says Mr Foster.

'For lawyers, it's important, because most of us have our main offices in the region.'The lawyers' sector group participating in the Services Challenge have set a goal of boosting market share by 15% over five years.

Various innovative ideas are being explored.

Already running is an intranet e-mail system connecting 16 firms, run by Jacksons Solicitors, which will enable secure mailing of documents.

Also planned are client opinion surveys, client care seminars, and a local professional skills register.But most importantly, the programme has forced a once largely insular corner of the profession to work together.John Ward, the former Barclays Bank regional board chairman who runs the Services Challenge, is 'amazed' at the transformation.

'They were so distrustful of one another that I was extremely sceptical that this would work.

But its worked out far better than I ever envisaged it would.'Another essential contribution to the region comes in the form of inward investment, attracted through the Northern Development Company, an agency run as a partnership between the public and private sector.

Since 1985, more than 450 foreign-owned projects have generated more than £7 billion in capital investment, both creating and securing 66,000 jobs.

Now, 20% of employment is in overseas-owned companies, such as Fujitsu in Darlington, Nissan in Sunderland, Hyundai, ADI Systems, and most recently, Siemens, with its £1.1 billion microchip plant in north Tyneside.

Some of the start-up legal work for new arrivals still goes to London, where the hourly rates are double or even treble what the north east firms will charge.

But most of the local commercial law firms have had a share of the work.There are still only around half a dozen local law firms of any size with significant commercial expertise.

For them, the prize is to continue winning back the legal business that leaks from the region.

Colin Hewitt, partner at Newcastle's third-biggest firm Ward Hadaway and head of its business services department, says of the north east: 'We still have problems, but generally speaking, we are doing well.

We are one of the fastest-changing regions.' Intellectual property work is a growth area for the firm, says Mr Hewitt.

'High-profile litigation is being handled more by local firms,' he says.

'Commercial property advice, on the back of Newcastle's continuing development boom, and public sector-related work remain strong,' he adds.David Laud, head of marketing at Jacksons Solicitors, says that in the last six months, acquisition, management buy-out and venture capital work has 'taken off dramatically'.

This has coincided with the firm radically 'repositioning' itself as a commercial firm, moving away from legal aid work entirely, and relocating from two offices into one new set of offices in Stockton-on-Tees.

The new office, with 140 computer workstations and plenty of room to continue an expansion programme, is conveniently situated out of town, on the A66, near the A1 northern trunk road, giving rapid mobility for staff.While 55% of the firm's business is defendant personal injury litigation for eight of the ten top insurance companies, 35% is broad commercial work.

This includes its specialist employment law advice, for prestigious clients including the Environment Agency, British Steel, and Black & Decker.The shape of the local profession is rapidly changing, and competition is hotting up.

A spate of mergers in the last two years, with the largest firms growing through swallowing smaller partnerships, shows no sign of abating.

And the bigger firms are moving in.

Eversheds has now pipped Dickinson Dees as the largest firm in Newcastle, in terms of numbers of qualified staff if not in client base.

London giant Davies Arnold Cooper recently set up shop in Newcastle, and there are rumours that Dibb Lupton Alsop is to follow, possibly with a local merger.

If Dibbs does, then many expect its old rival Hammond Suddards surely to follow.Eversheds, which recently merged with long-established Newcastle firm Wilkinson Maughan, also has offices in Middlesbrough and Leeds.

Simon Kermode, partnership director in Newcastle, says: 'You don't have to go to London or Leeds to get the services you require in Newcastle.' Inward investment clients have included Sanyo, Samsung, and Nissan.

Despite fears over south east Asian market turmoil, Mr Kermode says there is 'no reason to believe they will not continue investing here.

On the whole, these investments have been successful in their own right'.Dickinson Dees, which made its name in private client work for the great coal-owning families of the region such as the Joyces and Allendales, today remains the number one firm, in terms of a strong corporate local client base.

Of the 30 quoted companies based in the north east, 16 are clients of the firm.

Chief among them are Northern Electric, Northern Rock, Arriva (formerly the bus operator and car dealership, Cowie Group), Northumbrian Water, and the entreprenuerial transport operator, the Go-Ahead Group.The firm has also acted for various inward investment companies, including Siemens.

'Around 90% of our work is generated from clients headquartered in the north east,' says John Flynn, Dickinson Dees business development partner.

It was Mr Glynn who proposed the idea of the Services Challenge to the Northern Business Forum.

His inspiration was when the city council failed to ask the firm to tender for its £45 million metroline private finance initiative (PFI) project, giving it instead to the City firms.

In fact, the firm had masses of experience in much bigger PFI projects, but the council remained seemingly oblivious to the talent on its own back doorstep.

'That really annoyed me,' says Mr Flynn, candidly.Mr Flynn says the Services Challenge has yet to achieve its full potential and expresses 'disenchantment' over what he sees as a slow start.

'It's still not getting its message across,' he says.

So what for the future? 'The big challenge is for local lawyers to get into the public sector work in a bigger way, and to encourage a change in attitude among quoted companies, so they forget about going to the City altogether,' Mr Flynn adds.Recruitment of solicitors in Newcastle is buoyant, and is now very much 'a candidates market', says recruitment consultant, Penny Keatings.

A director of national consultancy Lipson Lloyd-Jones, she says the firms are keen on City-trained lawyers and often have a strong preference for candidates with a local connection.

'Firms are sometimes cautious, because in the past they've had people come up who have not stayed here.' But 'parochial' views are changing, and firms are increasingly competing for the best people.

Salaries in Newcastle may be up to 30% less than nearest competitor Leeds, but the city has much to recommend it.

A beautiful city centre, great night-life, galleries, theatres, and wild countryside close to hand, adding up to a quality of life not easily obtained elsewhere, says Ms Keatings.

And she should know, having trained at the city's Simpson Curtis, before moving to Dibb Lupton Broomhead and finally to Denton Hall in London.Most importantly, solicitors in the Geordie firms are given responsibility earlier than elsewhere, she says.

'As a junior, you're given a great deal autonomy, less bound to a partner's workload than in London.

There's great partnership potential, too.' Not a lot of people (outside Newcastle) know that, as Michael Caine would say.STEPHEN WARD TALKS TO SOLICITORS ACROSS THE REGION AND FINDS SEVERAL REASONS WHY THEY STEER CLEAR OF THE LONDON RAT RACENewcastle United Football Club is not the crucial reason for lawyers wanting to work in the area, but the way the team captures the passions of most of the community illustrates a wider trait, according to Lucy Winskell, a partner in Eversheds in the city.She says: 'There is a great pride in the north east, which you don't have so much in London.' Ms Winskell chose to return to her native Newcastle from law studies in Guildford while her fellow students were moving to what they saw as faster tracks with City firms.One attraction of working in a provincial city, aside from the better quality of life, used to be being a big fish in a smaller pond.

But she and other successful solicitors insist that increasingly they are not having to settle for work outside the Premier League.The quality of life comes from the sense of community, easy access to open countryside and the access to the coast.

Commuting time is usually 20-30 minutes rather than an hour or more in the capital.The quality of work comes from a changing relationship between solicitor and client over the past decade.

There has been a growing flexibility in the attitude of clients, according to Chris Caisley, a partner and head of litigation at Walker Morris in Leeds.

He explains: 'Gone are the days when a client says "I like Joe my lawyer, and I want him to be round the corner so I can pop in and have a chat to him".'At the same time, clients no longer assume the best solicitors are exclusively in London, and accept that regional experts can be just as good.

David Salter, a Leeds partner in Addleshaw Booth and Co, says: 'While ten years ago most of the seven-figure divorces were conducted in London, that's not so now.

More and more are dealt with outside London, and if clients live in Bristol or Norwich they'll go to Bristol or Norwich solicitors.'Kerry Macgill, a criminal law solicitor at Bradford-based Lumb and Macgill, says he has represented clients from Holland and Denmark, as well as almost 60 murderers in 20 years, including Peter Sutcliffe and a Sheffield solicitor, Ian Wood.Ms Winskell, a litigator who specialises in family, licensing and medical negligence, says: 'If you'd asked me five years ago I'd have said if you were based in Newcastle, the market was really north east based.

I see huge changes now.

My commercial partners do a lot of work for London and sourthern-based companies who no longer want to pay London and south east charging out rates to a large city firm.

I can have clients in south east England, as well as further into Leeds, Teeside and up into Scotland, where the clients have English property.'Mr Salter, who is chairman of the Solicitors Family Law Association, and frequently meets clients in London, says a solicitor can look after a client well even from hundreds of miles away.

He makes the point that accessibility is not governed by how close your office is, but how readily you can be reached by phone.New technology has also made a difference.

Ms Winskell mentions email, and telephone and video conferencing.

Chris Caisley, an insurance litigation partner at Walker Morris, says: 'We've had to be pretty innovative about how we service clients and develop new products.His firm has embraced information technology more than many London firms.

Its offices are on-line directly to many of its major clients, which include PLCs and building societies.Solicitors say transport links with the major centres in Yorkshire and the north east mean London can be reached easily, if expensively.

Mr Macgill, who has higher courts rights of audience, argues: 'The train from Wakefield is one hour 40 minutes.

You can go down daily for court of appeal cases.

I've done three as an advocate.

The Bar have been commuting to courts for years.' Newcastle to London is only an hour longer.Ms Winskel l says another obstacle to working with clients in the south east is now breaking down: 'It used to be common to have to trek down to London to barristers chambers with the client.

That's changed.

They're prepared to come to you or to company premises.' There are now more specialist civil sets in Newcastle.Mr Macgill says the only barristers' chambers in Bradford is growing.

He uses them for 75% of his cases, he says.

Within the regions of Yorkshire and the north east, the various lawyers' 'patches' have become more fluid.

The merger of Booths in Leeds and Addleshaw's in Manchester established a bridge across the Pennines, linking the traditionally separate business areas of the north east and the north west.Mr Macgill says: 'Boundaries are getting vaguer.

It used to be if you were in one West Riding town you would never go anywhere else.

I've just taken on a chap in Darlington recommended to me by a firm in London.

Our tentacles tend to spread quite widely.' Gordon Hetherington, a partner in Crutes in Middlesbrough, says he gets work across the region and nationally through its links with the firm's office in Newcastle.

Two Crutes solicitors recently co-ran a conference in San Francisco on alternative dispute resolution.

According to Chris Caisley, a lot of Walker Morris clients, particularly property clients, are based in London, and many of its insurance clients in Bristol.

The firms's niche sports law unit, specialising in contracts and intellectual property, has almost exclusively northern clients, but as Mr Caisley stresses, the number of professional soccer and rugby clubs in the north makes it a big pool in itself.

Crime is another area of work where the local market is strong enough to match or better London and the south east, according to Mr Macgill.

He says: 'Bradford has the volume of business to allow a local based clientele for crime.'Mr Hetherington says the same applies to crime and to his specialism of personal injury cases in Middesbrough.

He and other successful solicitors in the region believe they have the best of both worlds.

Mr Macgill says: 'I've never had the slightest urge to move to London.

I don't need to.' Mr Salter agrees.

'I would never consider moving south.

I know I'm very lucky.

I've got London-quality work in a first rate firm, which thankfully is doing very well at the moment.

A lot of people in London are very envious.'