Spotlight on conveyancing as Lerach holds court on Enron

After the recent high-profile Clifford Chance leaked memo drama, the media stepped down a gear this week and returned to a perennial favourite subject - conveyancing.

If The Observer has any say in the matter, conveyancing solicitors will soon be a thing of the past.

Neasa MacErlean decided that after ten 'gruesome' experiences with conveyancing solicitors, 'I was prepared to put in a couple of days' paperwork in order to save up to 700 - an attitude which resulted in me doing the conveyancing work when I bought a holiday home in Cornwall last month' (24 November).

The experience was apparently 'surprisingly easy - and rather pleasant' - depending, of course, on what one defines as 'pleasant'.

Ms MacErlean concludes that 'solicitors try to maintain the mysteries about conveyancing (so they can maintain their hefty fees) but when you break it down into its different parts you realise it is not so complicated'.

The Independent also leapt on the conveyancing bandwagon, breathlessly predicting the 'three-week sale' (20 November) with the introduction of e-conveyancing and seller's packs in the Queen's Speech.

Although it admitted that 'it could be five to ten years before every stage of buying a house can join the paperless society', the benefits would be worth waiting for - it could spell an end to 'gazumping, gazundering and the gruelling wait for sellers, buyers, agents, solicitors and lenders to reach a happy compromise'.

Despite its preoccupation with conveyancing, the media had not totally forgotten about their search for the holy grail - a British Enron.

The Times profiled Bill Lerach this week, the US's leading corporate fraud lawyer and scourge of Enron (19 November).

Mr Lerach, based at Milberg Weiss in San Diego, is apparently 'loathed in boardrooms from the Atlantic to the Pacific', and has been described both by the media and in corporate boardrooms as 'lower than pond scum', a 'blood-sucking scumbag', and 'a monkey with a razor blade'.

His crime? To 'file class-action cases on behalf of embittered investors against firms whose value has fallen on the stock exchange' - and pocket a '$10 million-a-year salary'.

Despite this earning power - although the paper pointed out that the sums of money swallowed in the Enron collapse 'make his salary look like a British fireman's wage' - Mr Lerach seems to keep faith with his humbled clients.

'On a sideboard are two packets of broccoli and cheddar soup,' The Times observed.

'This is not a business luncher.'

A controversial character in a firm which fights to the last 'to keep its share of the action', the paper said many accuse him of being 'as avaricious as the corporations he exposes'.

However, Mr Lerach is not deterred.

'Our work is controversial.

It calls the rich and powerful to account.

They don't suffer it in silence.

We take some pretty severe criticism from people, but I've the hide of an alligator, having been in this business all these years, and I've always said I care a lot more what I think of myself than what other people think of me.'

Victoria MacCallum