Press round upThe Bar found a supporter in the shape of The Guardian last week (26 April).

Describing 'a profession on the brink' due to changes in the legal system which meant work for junior barristers is drying up, it related the stories of junior counsel, such as Tony Hyams-Parish, who earned a mere 14,000 last year.Some more traditional perspectives were still in evidence.

One barrister lamented a salary of 30-40,000 ('it won't buy many bottles of Bollinger when you're out on the town with your friends from university').

Another fondly described unpaid pupillage as 'shameful.

It's more like fagging at public school'.

But Will Evans, who left the Bar to work at London law firm Attridge's, told the paper: 'It's quite clear that the future is a unified profession with the solicitors in pole position.'Two days later, a contributor to The Guardian's letter page said the Bar would only be under threat 'when the Queen is sprinting down the Mall with her corgis followed by a raging mob'.

Until then, he is unconvinced: 'Poor, threatened Bar - puh-lease.'Meanwhile the Times has unveiled the first solicitor superstar in recorded history (26 April).

The recipient of this epithet was human rights specialist - and winner of last year's Liberty/Gazette human rights lifetime achievement award - Geoffrey Bindman.The profile discussed Mr Bindman's work on the Pinochet case and his attempts to have people charged with war crimes prosecuted in the UK.

Mr Bindman displayed his usual enthusiasm for his chosen field.

'If you commit piracy in the high seas, you can be tried here.

Why can't you be tried here if you commit genocide or mass murder?'The Financial Times meanwhile sounded alarm bells for law firms with poor insurance claims records (3 May), now that the Solicitors Indemnity Fund is being disbanded.

Trevor Moss, a director of Nelson Hurst Professional Indemnity, said: 'I can think of a couple of big firms which are very likely to find it difficult on their claims records to to get cover on reasonable terms.'The Daily Telegraph related the story of a man who was so angry when his solicitors' fee went up from 500 to 8,000 that he gambled and gave away the 25,000 proceeds won from a divorce case rather than pay the firm's bill (28 April).

His defence lawyer said: 'He indicated that he lost 13,000 gambling and had given the rest to Bosnian refugees.'Caroline Berens, a partner at City law firm Vizards Staples & Bannister, was side by side with the likes of Bob Geldof and the British hairdresser of the year in discussing her interior designer in the Financial Times's 'How to Spend It' supplement (22 April).

'It didn't take me long to realise that, like me, Stephen [Ryan] is a perfectionist,' she said.

'Stephen seemed to understand what I was after almost before I did,' she went on, adding: 'I didn't think my taste could be quite so dramatic.'Jeremy Fleming