The Customer Focus Review by the Business Research Unit was presented to the Council of The Law Society in the third week of April.

I went to listen to the responses to it by the Secretary-General of The Law Society, Jane Betts (pictured here).

She has yet to demonstrate her ability to highlight policies to fulfil the aspirations of the profession, instead she clung to the safety of principles.As the various pointers had been explained in the findings of the survey so those findings confirmed the agenda which was raised by Martin Mears and Robert Sayer in 1995, I wondered whether anyone would question her principles and suggest that such principles were bland expressions of good intention.

No-one did.The Secretary-General informed the Council that she planned to make significant progress over the next six months and report back in October 1998 on five key issues -- relevance, reputation, representation, regulation and reviewing structures.No doubt, the report will be presented to the membership publicly at the Annual Solicitors' Conference in Bournemouth.

In the matter of representation there will be a Task Force which will include members of the Council and staff and have responsibility for one key issue.

It will draw upon expert support for lobbying and/or strategy.

It will forge alliances with any relevant external group and report and discuss progress weekly.On regulation, the proposal is that the effective complaint handling/disciplining of poor solicitors is a high priority.

Problems with the Solicitors' Indemnity Fund are being resolved through consultation and any new arrangement will weed out consistently negligent solicitors.Reviewing structures will include consideration of the fact that The Law Society's present structure is inappropriate for a £44m business and lacks strong procedures which can lead to over-spending.

By way of bullet points, the Secretary-General remarked upon the fact that there is a perception that the organisation is over-manned, under-skilled and over-spent.

That it is slow to respond, huge sums of money are wasted and it involves itself in poor business planning.

Betts also calls into question the size of the Council and the Committee structure.She, herself, refers to The Law Society as a "snoozing giant of bureaucracy, too fat to be nimble".

According to the Secretary-General, some of the issues are already being addressed, namely re-focusing a number of activities and resource modelling, whatever that may mean, and demanding a budget target for 1998/1999.In order to move on she says that we need to make better use of money, time, and streamline to deliver what the members want.That was what she presented to the Council.

As I listened to the lady I realised that this was someone who missed her vocation of a Commandant of the Women's Royal Air Force addressing a squad of new recruits for whom English is a second language.Other people speak but the Secretary-General articulates.During the course of her pep-talk to the Council she did let slip that she wanted to see "Champions" of the various interest groups within the profession.

My thoughts turned to the name Mr Henry Hodge, the High Street Champion.

Then, of course, the Secretary-General was not in place in 1995 when this idea was all the rage and promised to the profession.

There were workshops up and down the country with the President and his entourage telling the profession just how much they were going to do for us.

That cost £60,000.

The essential questions raised in what are described as "Key Issues" remains as it was a decade ago.

Namely, that there is an inherent problem for The Law Society in both regulating as well as representing its membership.

The same "key issues" surface: effective complaints handling and its independence; the need for effective discipline to eradicate poor solicitors.

The review of legal training to fit with changes in market demand and, of course, the contributions to the Indemnity Fund.

It was only in 1992 that the then President was able to say he did not intend to "engage in navel-gazing".

Six years down the line, the Council has had a mirror held up to itself and its Chief Executive.The history of the machine-gun, the tank and the aeroplane has been punctuated by the inability to sacrifice cherished traditions and accept innovation.It has been plain to everyone outside Chancery Lane that for several years Legal Aid work is unprofitable.

The professional indemnity insurance is becoming crippingly expensive and that conveyancers are responsible for the disproportionate demands upon the profession have at last surfaced as topics of consideration at Chancery Lane.The fear must be that just as in the middle of the first world war, the tendency on the part of the generals to under-estimate the determination of their enemies caused unnecessary suffering.

So it is with a profession which has not lifted a finger or expressed a murmur against a green form scheme under the Legal Aid Board Regulations which now requires a 14 page document to be completed at no charge to anyone except the solicitor before preliminary advice may be given.

The franchising scheme is but a halfway stage to a Nationalised Legal Service.

No-one appears to be willing to spell out the consequences of rates of pay hourly basis which are uneconomic.

Either the cases are spun out unnecessarily to make them economic or Legal Aid will be done by progressively fewer and fewer firms.

Those that remain will be nothing more than instruments of central or local government.That the profession is going to contract in numbers and see the elimination of a substantial proportion of sole practitioners is not in doubt, at least not by the Secretary-General.Council Members will now recall Von Clausewitz: there is nothing more common than to hear of men losing their energy on being raised to a higher position, to which they do not feel themselves equal.