With the franchising contract finally settled, legal aid practitioners might have expected a quiet period for consolidation.

Alas, the troops are already massing for another battle .

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this time over the report on the fundamental review of legal aid expenditure.

As we enter into a debate over legal aid 'fundholders', we also need to take a broader view of the changes and the choices facing us.No one of any political persuasion or the most optimistic temperament can believe that legal aid in what is left of the 1990s will follow the pattern of the last decade.

Throughout that period, the rise in expenditure came close to tripling inflation and doubling the growth in the gross domestic product.

Legal aid expanded almost sixfold during Mrs Thatcher's first ten years.

We have to recognise that this is not going to continue.A fundamental challenge to the current situation is, therefore, just around the corner.

Franchising contracts will prove to be only the outriders of change.

The danger in recognising this as a problem is, however, that debate tends to become limited to the merits of specific cost-saving mechanisms.The recent paper from the Social Market Foundation illustrates this quite precisely.

Based on a somewhat simple assessment of the factors driving up legal aid costs .

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namely solicitors' ingenuity and lack of restraint .

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the authors suggest a simplistic solution: a new bureaucracy of fundholders.

Debate about the future can, however, be approached from a completely different direction .

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literally.

Santa Monica, California, is the crucible of the technology that will change much of the world we know.

The law is not exempt.

A firm called North Communications has developed an 'electronic kiosk' which allows a litigant in person to explore court procedures by way of interactive video and then assists in the drafting of the appropriate court documents.

Known as QuickCourt, it has already revolutionised proceedings in a pilot group of Arizona courts.

The kiosk offers the promise of opening up court processes to those unab le or unwilling to afford lawyers.On the other side of the Pacific rim, an ambitious Australian experiment is beginning with the use of electronic communications systems to link lawyers with each other and with the courts.

In this country, most legal aid practitioners have reached as far as using computers for word processing and accounts.

It is the equivalent of breaking through into the technological bronze age.

The full potential of the information revolution is still to be explored.

Used properly, it has the capacity to provide access for ordinary people to levels of knowledge previously out of their reach.

Similarly, it will have a massive effect on the work that an 'expert' such as a lawyer actually does.

The electronic kiosk may or may not, in practice, be a good idea but it is certainly an effective symbol of a new element that we need to introduce into domestic discussion of the future.

It represents two crucial factors that can easily be forgotten.

First, we must retain a capacity for lateral thought in solving the problem of achieving a more equal access to justice with more restricted amounts of additional money.Secondly, we need to develop an openness to innovation elsewhere.

Every modern democracy faces the same problem of opening its justice system to all members of its society.

We can learn from the thought, experiment and practice of others.This is the thinking behind an ambitious project established jointly by the Legal Action Group and the Nuffield Foundation.

Eight people at the cutting edge of developments in publicly funded legal services around the world are coming to London for a week in November.

They will participate in an open conference, a series of closed seminars and produce papers which will eventually be published in a book.

The intention is to make an impact on what happens in this country.The eight guests bring a very diverse experience.

Three come from the USA, reflecting the Clinton administration's experience in rethinking publicly funded legal services; the various experiments to improve court procedures and alternative dispute resolutions; and the drive to lessen lawyers' costs in a country that lacks a national civil legal aid scheme.This last will be the subject of a contribution from Los Angeles lawyer Forrest Mosten, whose office contains a law library specifically for his clients to use and whose practice involves 'unbundling cases' so that he, as lawyer, undertakes the minimum of work and, hence, makes the minimum charge for his clients.

Contributors from Canada and Australia will talk about the role of public legal information and education as well as the use of new technology.There are lessons to be learnt even from countries with less developed economies, particularly those with a common law tradition.

The objectives of legal aid and the use of paralegals are both subjects which are being actively debated in South Africa, from where two speakers will attend.

India's courts have developed state of the art mechanisms for dealing with what we would call multi-party actions.

This will be the subject of a contribution from Indira Jaising, an Indian senior advocate who acted for some of the Bhopal victims.Reform of legal aid can no longer be divorced from reform of court processes or the practices of the profession itself.

The project represents LAG's attempt to contribute to a series of crucially important issues affecting legal aid practice over the next decade.

-- LAG's conference, 'Shaping the future', will be held at City University on 12 November.

Details from LAG, 242 Pentonville Road, London N1 9UN.