Once upon a time -- in fact as recently as last year -- the person elected as Deputy Vice-President of the Law Society could confidently start drafting his presidential address.

The electoral challenges for the two top officers this year topple this cosy old order, perhaps for ever.

And so, instead of getting struck into the two-year apprenticeship for the top slot, this year's nomination for Deputy Vice-President, Tony Girling, is watching the increasingly feverish election activities and listening to the ever more acrimonious exchanges between this year's candidates with avid interest.This feisty (his own description) 51 year old is probably temperamentally more suited to the stump than any of this year's candidates.

He looks like a Conservative candidate; the kind of intellectually taut and thrusting individual whom Mrs Thatcher would have marked out for the big time.

His good looks and dapper dress sense would score points on a hustings platform.

His boundless energy ('I need very little sleep' would help him keep both campaign and practice going.

But his strongest plus would be his style of delivery.

'He is as good a communicator as it is possible to find,' one fellow Council member said.Mr Girling stands out on the Council.

It is not only that he can be depended upon to have matching silk handkerchief and tie in daffodil yellow/poppy red.

Or that he is the only one to have appeared on the cover of The Skier.

Or that his delivery is studiedly polished with hallmark ('laboured', said one observer) use of aphorisms, such as: 'managing a partnership is akin to herding a flock of cats.'No, what marks him out is his willingness to champion promotional campaigns that his more conservative fellow members would not touch with a barge pole.The Will Power campaign is a classic example.

It took Mr Girling at his persuasive best to convince the Council that a hero figure in skin-tight turquoise tights with matching 'go fast' cape could bring the profession wills, probate and other spin-off business.

He laughs heartily at the memory.

'I will never forget the face of one or two Council members when I introduced the Will Power concept.' Even now there are those Council members who regard the campaign as acceptable only because it was so successful.

'Dreadfully naff,' said one.

But recent research showing a 10% increase over five years in the public's association of wills with solicitors, as well as the large volume of wills written during the annual wills week, show that men in tights can be very good for the profession.Mr Girling's persuasive skills were arguably even more impressive when it came to the Transaction campaign.

This selling job amounted to convincing first Law Society committees and then the profession that they should change the time-honoured way of doing conveyancing.The interesting thing is that Mr Girling, the senior partner of Girlngs in Kent, is a litigator and has no more than an academic interest in non-contentious work.

But he attributes his success in swaying the doubters to his litigation background.

'When you have a committee of people looking at you [and] lacking in trust because you are trying to change the established order, then you have to have negotiating skills in order to prevent people falling out with you and adopting dug-in stances.'On behalf of the Society, Mr Girling has most recently presented a series of probate roadshows.

Again, the fact that he has no practical knowledge of probate work was no barrier.

As a close observer points out, he is 'extremely able, very thorough even when it is not his topic'.

A solicitor wh o attended a probate roadshow described Mr Girling as 'a real showman, but he seemed to know his stuff'.His reputation for getting the message across in style has earned him several lecturing contracts from training companies.

'It is something I came to by accident, but I know that I have been successful because they have evaluation forms telling how I have done and the [feedback] has encouraged me to carry on with it.'Indeed, he reveals that over the last 18 months the bulk of his fee-earning has derived from lecturing on solicitors' costs.

He claims to be 'one of the very few people in the country with any detailed knowledge of this subject' and adds: 'It is a topic which is close to my heart and close to the profession's heart.

It is about money.'If he succeeds to the presidency, Mr Girling will make a big thing about improving communications with the profession.

As chairman of a new working party on specialist interest groups and specialist committees, he has just got the green light to pilot an idea, borrowed from Australia, whereby the Society would be re-organised into specific sections under the scheme.

A person joining the Society would also join one or more sections -- family law, business law, general practice, international law etc.

Not only that, but the members of each section would elect their own committees and chairpeople.In this way he believes members would feel a greater sense of involvement and thus be more amenable to messages from Chancery Lane.

He explains: 'Unless you have got people feeling involved and potentially interested in what you are going to tell them, it does not matter how many roadshows you operate, or how many campaigns you run, you will not reach them.'Although he is far from disinterested in the matter, Mr Girling hopes for urgent constitutional change to ensure that only the Deputy Vice-President's office is put to a vote of the entire membership.

'I would hope that it would change in relation to the other two offices.

I do not believe that we will have suitable quality candidates coming forward if they do not know from one end of the year to the next if they are going to have to give up their practices for a year or not.' The main thing that is bugging him about the present US presidential-style election campaign is that is that all the candidates feel compelled to make lavish promises about changes in the future without according much credit to the Society for all that has already been achieved.

There is a strong element of 'telling people what they want to hear' and he doubts that much of the promises are realisable, especially within a one-year term.Mr Girling confesses to a yen for the campaign trail.

But he would take a different approach.

'In a [US] presidential-style election I think you have to campaign on who you are and what you are and whether people believe in you as a person, rather than necessarily hitching your wagon to a whole series of issues which you personally are not going to control.'Without prompting, observers describe Mr Girling variously as 'ambitious', 'bloody ambitious' and 'very ambitious'.

Is he? 'Unashamedly ambitious,' is the reply.

'I have never made any secret of wanting to be President or to be at the top of my firm.'