Papers call for the real Lord Woolf to stand up

Perhaps it was the terrible weather or merely a bout of the January blues, but there seemed no accounting for Lord Woolf's sudden transformation from famously liberal darling of the left to a 'lock 'em up' hawk.

With his declaration last week that mobile phone robbers would 'face long jail terms', and 'only rare exceptions would escape prison' (The Times, 30 January), he appeared to have momentarily forgotten his previous calls for 'fewer, shorter jail sentences', and his famous declaration that 'overcrowding is the Aids virus of the prison system' (The Observer, 3 February).

Although some criminal law solicitors welcomed the Lord Chief Justice's comments, which 'would not only clarify the law, but would deter people who thought mobile phone mugging was not a serious offence' (The Independent, 30 January), other commentators were less sure.

'The principles of redemption enshrined in his ruling that Robert Thompson and Jon Venables must go free reflected the Lord Chief Justice at his boldest and most brilliant, but his latest Rumsfeldian line on tough sentencing begs [sic] the obvious question: what has happened to Lord Woolf?' (The Observer, 3 February).If Lord Woolf was having a bad week, it seemed to rub off on the rest of the profession, as causes for concern in the solicitors' world were thick on the ground.

The collapse of a murder trial in Lincolnshire last week because police bugged the defendants' conversations with their solicitors (see page 3) sent The Times into a justifiable lather (30 January).A leader described the officers' actions - when 'even the most junior officer would have realised the law was being breached' - as 'disastrous to justice'.The paper said: 'The law will take its course in deciding what action should be taken against the officers.

But before then the police service which brought this case and the Crown Prosecutors who argued it must face the righteous anger of a society once again failed by those charged with its protection.'Something else most definitely not in the public interest is this week's revelation by the Legal Services Commission that 'fraudulent legal aid claims involving solicitors have quadrupled in three years and now total more than 4 million', up from 800,000 in 1998 (The Independent, 30 January).

According to the commission, most of the frauds involved solicitors 'exaggerating the amount of work they had done', or 'making multiple claims for the same work'.

Hard-up legal aid solicitors should perhaps take advice from London's Evening Standard, and consider switching specialism to employment.

As predicted in the Gazette's Christmas special (see [2001] Gazette, 15 December, 25), in a recession employment specialists tend to find their workloads remain buoyant, and may flourish.William Garnett, employment lawyer at London-based Bates Wells & Braithwaite, said his firm has 'four times as many lawyers as it did two years ago, and we're still very busy' (28 January).

Not only is he advising recession-hit companies, 'who are notoriously bad at dealing with redundancies', on how to lay staff off, but also working on an increasing number of employment tribunal claims.

Owing to 'enormous new pieces of employment legislation', the previously subservient masses are learning to stick up for their rights.

As Mr Garnett said: 'Gone are the days when an employee would tug on his forelock when told he was being made redundant.'And finally, some good news for the beleaguered profession in this country.

In a case of 'only in America', Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman appointed to the US Supreme Court, has confessed to a 'brief romantic entanglement with none other than William Rehnquist, the current Chief Justice' (The Independent, 28 January).

The 'imposing' Ms O'Connor admits that the young love-birds went to a few movies, and - enigmatically - 'one thing or another' when students at law school, but stressed that her appointment as the crucial swing vote on the Supreme Court bench was all to do with talent and nothing to do with little black books.Victoria MacCallum