The expansion of the EU offers huge potential to English and Welsh solicitors, argues Janet Paraskeva

Solicitors in England and Wales are probably better placed than members of any other legal profession in the EU to take advantage of the massive opportunities that exist for the provision of legal services to more than 370 million people now, and many millions more on the accession of the ten new member states in May this year.

Ours is the most flexible and deregulated legal services market in the EU.

Our firms are well positioned to take advantage of other EU markets where local suppliers are more heavily regulated and less able to be imaginative in the provision of services.

English and Welsh solicitors have often been pioneers in new markets - firms started to set up in Brussels as early as the 1960s.

It was the British experience of privatisation in the 1980s that gave English and Welsh lawyers a particular advantage and took them all over the world to countries seeking to privatise sectors of their economies.

As such, they stand to gain a great deal from proposals aimed at cracking open markets.

It is hoped that recent initiatives from Europe will do just that.

In 2000, the European Council committed itself to making the EU the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world within ten years.

It wants to achieve this in part by removing the barriers to the free movement of services and by making competition policy work more effectively.

The draft services directive, published in January, combined with enlargement of the union, opens a vast market for providers of legal services - in English law, community law and national law - from Poland to Portugal, Estonia to Greece.

The report on competition in the professions, published last week by Mario Monti, the competition commissioner, will also contribute to these developments.

Coming from Italy, Mr Monti will be well versed in the sclerotic nature of professional services in his home country, and this probably explains why he has been keen to look hard at the providers of professional services, including lawyers.

His report aims to take away some of the obstacles to the free movement of services, building on past directives.

The draft Services Directive seeks to build on the Establishment Directive, which allows lawyers to deliver legal services in other member states.

The commission's objective is to make it as easy as possible to supply professional services across borders or for a professional to set up in business in another member state.

Therefore, what is contained in the draft directive could be beneficial for those smaller and medium-sized firms that identify opportunities outside England and Wales.

The part of the draft directive that has attracted the most interest is the proposal made in article 39 about codes of conduct.

Article 39 seeks to encourage the different service sectors (not specifically lawyers) to establish codes of conduct that would encourage cross-border activity.

In fact, lawyers already have such a code that applies to cross-border work.

However, the directive also says that member states should take measures to encourage professional bodies to implement the codes of conduct adopted at community level, in the domestic sphere.

This element of the directive has prompted particular anxieties that a single code of conduct is on the cards for lawyers in Europe.

However, the wording of the directive says nothing stronger than that member states should 'encourage' professional bodies to adopt such a code.

Any such code would inevitably be at a high level.

The Council of Bars and Law Society of the European Union is currently looking at the possibility of a single code, but there has been no real debate or discussion on this question, so we should not expect anything soon.

In any event, the Law Society would not sign up to any proposal that was not in the interests of solicitors in England and Wales, or that would represent a step backwards in terms of our rules.

Mr Monti's report on competition seeks to do away with the remaining restrictions on services - whether that means bans on advertising in Greece or minimum fees in Germany.

He also considers business structures and multi-disciplinary partnerships (MDPs).

The report does not really take a firm view, noting the advantages and disadvantages for consumers that MDPs might bring.

However, he concludes that the protection of lawyers' independence and personal liability may be achieved in other ways than by a ban on MDPs, and therefore that, in some markets, ownership restrictions might be relaxed.

The report seems to have been published with one ear to the UK's Clementi review of legal services, perhaps in the hope that Clementi may come up some imaginative solutions to these regulatory problems.

These initiatives from Europe have stimulated much comment in the UK legal press, and not a little scaremongering.

In fact, given that legal services in England and Wales are already among the most liberalised in Europe, the proposals made in the competition report and in the draft directive are unlikely to change the way we do things here - except to give solicitors more opportunities to expand.

However, there will be an impact on the legal sector in other member states, encouraging liberalisation that will be beneficial to English and Welsh solicitors who wish to expand and exploit those opportunities.

Janet Paraskeva is the Law Society chief executive