In December the Law Society's Council adopted a motion which opened the way to consultation on the publication of guideline fees for conveyancing.

Allied to this would be changes to the Solicitors Indemnity Rules 'to the intent that Solicitors Indemnity Fund cover should not generally be available in cases where fees were charged at rates lower than provided by the guidelines.

In such cases, solicitors would be required to arrange their own insurance cover through an authorised insurer.'If eventually this fee scale/indemnity insurance proposal proceeds, then the appropriate rule would need the consent of the Master of the Rolls, Sir Thomas Bingham.

Sir Thomas has made it plain that the indemnity rules should not be 'used to achieve ends which do not concern the provision of indemnity against loss but have some other object'.

This stipulation does not mean that the profession would have to pretend that the proposed change in the indemnity rules would not have the probable effect of producing a general rise in conveyancing fees.

What the Master of the Rolls' requirement amounts to is that the proposal should be fully justifiable on insurance underwriting grounds.Or, to put it another way: suppose high street conveyancers were in fine fettle and there were no problem of rising costs and falling fees, would the profession still be right to be concerned about the risks (or alleged risks) proposed by cut-price conveyancing?In the great conveyancing/indemnity insurance debate, the tooth and nail antagonism of the Solicitors Indemnity Fund has been a serious factor.

The Master of the Rolls might well ask why he should approve proposals opposed by the Law Society's own 'experts'.

What is the basis of SIF's opposition?The general theme of the draft consultation paper produced by the Vice-President is this.

The Law Society has calculated that the minimum time involved in conducting a straightforward conveyancing transaction is around five hours.

In a case with any complications, this time could be doubled.

A reasonable charging rate for a properly qualified high street conveyancer would be in the region of £100 per hour.

The average fee at present charged for a conveyancing transaction is around £270 (this is the average.

Many firms charge significantly less).

If a solicitor should be charging around £500 to provide an adequate service, it must follow that in charging £200, it is highly unlikely that in the medium and long term, the solicitor will be able to offer a service of the same standard.

This, one would have thought, was a mere truism but in the SIF paper produced before the December Council meeting, SIF declared that it could 'see no underwriting reason for treating low cost conveyancers any differently from others'.

This conclusion SIF reached, not by 'solely looking at the figures from the perspective of arithmetic', but on the basis of 'claims-handling experience derived from many years of the indemnity scheme'.The SIF paper does not explain what would amount to an 'underwriting reason'.

The fact is that insurers assess a prospective risk on the basis of past experience but also on inherent probabilities.

A lion tamer or trapeze artist will pay a higher premium for life or accident insurance than a chartered accountant.

It will be no use for them to say to the insurance company: 'But you haven't got any worthwhile statistics on lion tamers and anyway I am an extremely good tamer who has never been bitten in his life.'It is not surprising, then, that when one of the leading professional indemnity insurers was asked about its attitude to insuring cut-price conveyancers, the response was unenthusiastic: it was obvious that this was high risk business.

Obvious to anyone except SIF, it seems.

But the SIF position was based partly on its 'claims-handling experience derived from the many years of the scheme'.

Claims-handling experience? What claims-handling experience? Does SIF know something we do not? It appears not.

The SIF paper itself states in terms that SIF 'has never held information as to the fee charged in respect of individual conveyancing transactions or any other types of work undertaken on a client's behalf'.

So much for 'claims-handling experience'.Are there, then, no available figures at all? Yes, there are.

The Law Society has supplied SIF with the names of three groups of conveyancing firms.

The first group, A, comprised cut-price conveyancing firms whose names were supplied by local law societies.

The second group, B, comprised cut-price firms advertising in local papers.

The third group, C, the control group, comprised 'ordinary', ie randomly selected, conveyancing firms.Between 1989 and June 1995, the 40 cut-price firms were responsible for claims in respect of residential conveyancing of £4.9 million or an average of £121,000 per firm.

Over the same period, the control group of ordinary firms caused payments of £0.43 million, an average of £17,500 per firm.Claims paid for the cut-price group in respect of commercial conveyancing totalled £4.4 million (an average of 110,000 per firm).

For the randomly selected firms, the figure was £0.29 million, an average of £11,500.These figures seem clear enough.

How would SIF set about demolishing them.

Let us look at some of its arguments.Argument one: the number of firms in the three groups is small.

Yes, but the point is that the results drawn from the sample more than confirm what common sense would tell one to expect, ie cut-price conveyancing = indemnity claims.

It is arguable that the sample size (an estimated 5.5% of the total number of cut-price firms) is statistically large.

It far exceeds that used in market research or opinion polls.Argument two: it is said that 'Group A, comprised firms well known to local law societies, is clearly the worst group as a whole.

By the very fact of these firms being known in the area and singled out for identification to the Law Society as part of this exercise, these firms might be regarded as those most at risk of claims.'I reply first that the firms were not singled out as being bad but as being cut price; and, secondly, according to the SIF paper, only one firm in the group came from the 207 'targeted' firms identified by SIF in 1994 as having a very poor claims record.The SIF paper goes on to mention that 35% of the firms in this group were entirely free of residential conveyancing claims and therefore managed 'to practise low cost residential conveyancing without costing the fund any money at all'.Really, SIF must make up its mind.

Are firms in this group good or are they bad? The statement that a third of the firms managed to cut prices without producing claims carries the corollary that two-thirds of the firms did not achieve this happy result.Argument three: as to group B, the SIF paper says: 'It is clearly apparent that two of the firms within this group had significantly bad claims records in terms of residential conveyancing.

If these two firms are removed from the group, there is very little difference between this group and the control group.'This is an interesting approach to statistics.

But if SIF can remove two 'u nhelpful' examples from group B, then I must be entitled to do the same with the control group -- in which case the balance is restored.