Eileen Pembridge prides herself on not being, as she puts it, 'mealy mouthed'.

Outspoken, often blunt, she will say her piece even if the boat gets a good rocking in the process.It was this trait which led her to lift the lid on allegations of sexual harassment of Council members and staff at Chancery Lane.

Last weekend, at a conference in London, a stunned audience of mostly female lawyers heard her challenge the current President of the Law Society, Charles Elly, to say what the Society was doing about the problem.Some onlookers regarded Ms Pembridge's outburst as the opening shots in her presidential election campaign.

But she insists that she would have spoken out anyway.

She was incensed by what she claimed was the 'apparent hypocrisy' of Charles Elly referring to sexual harassment as a problem in law firms when the problem existed on his own doorstep.

And, as far as she was aware, no steps had been taken to produce the internal code of conduct she had requested following allegations of sexual harassment at Chancery Lane two years ago.Ms Pembridge also admits to having been stung that Mr Elly, in a speech which talked of getting more women onto the Council, failed to mention the fact that she was running for President.Ms Pembridge, who runs Fisher Meredith, a south London legal aid practice, says she was compelled to enter the presidential race when Martin Mears declared his candidacy.

She was never very happy with John Young, the Council's choice of candidate, regarding him as 'an affable chap' but without the necessary leadership qualities.

But Mr Mears she regards as a particularly objectionable candidate by virtue of what she regards as his reactionary views and his 'wholly unproductive anti-Chancery Lane line'.

'Whereas I regarded one candidate with dismay, I viewed the other with horror,' she says.Mr Mears has taunted her about being a recent convert to democracy querying why she did not stand for election in any of the five years she has been on the Council.

Her answer is to say, yes, she had thought about running, but the demands of her legal aid practice made taking a year out untenable until now.If elected, Ms Pembridge promises to bang the drum for the profession at large - her slogan is 'Standing up for the profession'.

But in particular she promises to champion the interests of women lawyers and legal aid practitioners.She is adamant that women must have better representation.

At the last meeting of the Society's Council - which has only eight female members - she was heavily defeated in her bid to have one seat dedicated a woman's seat.

It was a major blow to her campaign to give women a higher profile.

Her belief is that women are deterred from seeking election throug h the traditional local law society route because it is so 'overwhelmingly male'.

'No self-respecting women, certainly not those with children, want to spend their evenings at what may essentially be a dining club,' she says.She is hopeful that the system may become more available to women as a result of the current review of local law societies, but meanwhile she believes there is an overwhelming case for affirmative action.

Until there was a critical mass of women on the Council, the issues affecting women generally would go unchampioned.

'Issues like part-time work, the glass ceiling, maternity leave for partners and women leaving it so late to have their children that they are spending their spare hours down the fertility clinics need to be brought to the fore.'More generally she believes the Council would be a much improved place with more women members.

'Women approach things differently.

They are more prone to get on with the work without [attaching] so much importance to having a gong or wearing some insignia or...junketing.'Ms Pembridge's campaign has had a major boost from the Legal Aid Practitioners Group which has pledged to support her.

But legal aid, Ms Pembridge points out, is not only a campaign platform, it is her daily bread.

She set up her own firm in partnership with one other 20 years ago and now has a staff of 65.

The firm is successful and franchised but, she points out, in common with all firms dependant on legal aid rates, 'we exist on a knife edge'.

This message she conveyed to the Lord Chancellor personally when she recently accompanied Charles Elly on an ultimately unsuccessful mission to persuade Lord Mackay to award a pay increase to matrimonial lawyers.Even those who would not support Ms Pembridge for President speak of her enormous reserves of energy and dynamism.

'She is indefatigable,' says one Council member who recalls her 'lavatory campaign'.

For four years, Ms Pembridge insisted on using the Council members' lavatory although its facilities were solely aimed at male members.

She objected to having to walk a long distance to the female loo.

She assured her discomfited fellow male members that, being shortsighted, she could hardly recognise them from the front much less from the back.Ms Pembridge's early career was not as a lawyer but as an interpreter with the UN: 'It gave me a world view.' The daughter of a railway family in Worcestershire, she attended the local grammar school and then Cambridge, where she read natural sciences.

She might have been a biochemist had her yearning to master languages not taken over.She studied Russian and French and went on to work in most of the UN agencies around the world.

Later she learned Spanish and spent time in Mexico teaching science.In the early 1970s she returned to London and began work with the drug charity, Release.

It occurred to her while she was sending out work to solicitors that she should qualify and do the work herself.

And so she did.