Adam Taylor's poetical style has been indelibly marked by his experience as a litigator.

'I've had the unnerving experience of seeing a letter which I rushed off at five o'clock one evening being brought into court and having its every word analysed to the nth degree by barristers and judges,' he says.

'After you've gone through that you never write anything in quite the same way again.

When I write poems I'm constantly checking that I'm not saying anything which I don't absolutely have to say.

After writing the initial draft of a poem I go through and cut a lot of stuff out which doesn't need to be said.

However, the main difference between poetry and litigation is that in poetry you're looking to create ambiguity and different layers of meaning, whereas in litigation you're going for absolute clarity.' Mr Taylor, an intellectual property and information technology lawyer, is a leading expert on the millennium bug.

He draws on his legal work for many of his poems, for example 'Millennium Meltdown', which describes the arrival of the bug at midnight on 31 December 1999.

Other work looks at the lifestyle of the City lawyer.

In 'Alan' he describes what motivated the first prehistoric life form to crawl onto dry land; a dissatisfaction with the quality of life in the sea and the absence of decent wine bars.

A high-flyer who is also qualified in the United States, Mr Taylor seemed to his colleagues at City firm Withers to be the classic corporate lawyer.

But while he was delivering seminars across London on the millennium bug by day, by night he was hanging around the Poetry Cafi in Covent Garden, where aspirant poets can take the floor in 'open mike' sessions and read their work before the critical literati.

'It's absolutely nerve wracking,' admits Mr Taylor.

'Lecturing and advocacy bear no comparison to reading out your own productions.

The extra element for me is that my poems are intended to be funny, so there's always the risk of hearing a deafening silence.

The first time I read, I went somewhere where nobody would know me, and I didn't take anyone with me.

That went down well so I began reading at the Poetry Cafi.

Then I got my break last year at the Ledbury Poetry Slam.' A poetry slam is a strange event, a cross between an opera and a darts match.

Contestants enter heats in which they read their poetry to a drunken audience and are marked largely on the warmth of the response which they receive, progressing through quarter-final, semi-final and so on.

Tactics are important, it is common to hear a poet leaving a slam claiming that he was robbed by a rival who read a yucky poem about cute children just after he had, for example, referred to a baby being eaten in his own, vastly superior, poem.

Mr Taylor -- who reads his arch rhymes in a dry, deadpan style which is extremely funny -- reached the semi-final of the prestigious Ledbury Poetry Festival in 1998.

On the strength of his irony-laden performance he was invited to return to the festival this month as an official performer, where he found himself in the company of the recently-appointed Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion.

Supported by his friends and family, Mr Taylor did not tell his work colleagues about his performance at Ledbury, although they soon found out after The Independent covered the event.

He was then approached by Withers's senior partner, Diana Parker, and asked to contribute some poems to the firm's internal newsletter, which he did.

'Not without some trepidation,' he recalls.

'One is exposing oneself.' Mr Taylor has now been invited to expose himself on a BBC televised poetry competition, to be screened in September.

Mr Taylor admits that he often finds it difficult to find the time to write poetry while holding down a City job.

However, he says: 'Poetry is a way of getting involved with creative writing that is manageable.

AIthough it's still time-consuming, I find it takes a long time to compose even a short poem, it's very much less than the time it takes to write a novel, which I've also considered doing.' Other lawyers have found more pragmatic way of integrating their interest in the arts into their legal work.

Mark Stephens, the senior partner of City firm Stephens Innocent, came away from this month's Greenwich & Docklands International Festival with two new clients to add to a list which already includes many instructions from artists and musicians.

As chairman of the festival he was responsible for approving its programme and making sure the festival's creative director and producer were equipped with sufficient funds and a congenial working environment.

'If everything goes right I take all the credit, if it goes wrong I take the flack,' he says blithely.

'There's lot of pressure in a ten-day festival because it only runs for a limited period of time, it's not like a theatre company where if one show bombs you can recoup your losses on the next one.' Arts and Business, the organisation formally known as the Association for Business Sponsorship of the Art, approached Mr Stephens last autumn with the request to chair the festival, which is a complicated task because it involves cross-borough co-operation between Greenwich, Lewisham, Tower Hamlets and Newham.

'They wanted somebody they could parachute into the festival, because it's had a shaky history financially,' explains Mr Stephens.

'One of the problems with arts festivals is to find business people with experience in the arts.

Many business men and women are involved in the arts as a hobby, but few of them have done it as a business.' However, Mr Stephens has the dubious qualification of having managed a '70s band called the Fabulous Poodles.

Better CV material is the fact that he acted with the Royal Shakespeare Company as a child and later set up Art Law, a national legal advice centre for the arts, which he ran from a warehouse in Tower Hamlets.

The experience of working in the borough has, he says, helped with his work on the Greenwich & Docklands International Festival, which uses urban spaces from Canary Wharf to derelict music halls and the underground as venues for performances in music, dance and theatre.

A festival project in which Mr Stephens has taken a particular interest is Gallery 37, which takes young unemployed people from the local community and trains them so that they can get jobs within the arts community.

'At board meetings I choose not to use my legal expertise,' says Mr Stephens.

'It's better to get external advice if needed, you shouldn't advise yourself.

Sometimes people are asked specifically to be the legal presence on the board but that was not my case, I was there to chair.' One lawyer who was asked to be a legal presence on the advisory panel of an arts festival is Michael Zahara, of Devon firm Woollcombe Beer Watts.

Mr Zahara sits on the advisory panel of the Independent on Sunday's 'Ways with Words' literary festival, which was held in Devon this month.

He says: 'We assist in arrangements with bodies like the Millennium Grant Fund.

It's a big organisational business but no specific legal issues have come up yet in relation to the writers who attend, just brainstorming sessions on issues of policy.

The principle is that professional legal advice is there to have at the push of a button.

It's good that lawyers should use their professional skills to help the general public to get to hear and see, relatively cheaply, the authors whose works they read.' Mr Zahara, who practises criminal law, writes novels himself, though he has not yet published.

As he walks through the festival venue, a beautiful mediaeval courtyard on the fringes of Dartmoor, he admits that it can be a little galling to see how young some of the successful writers which the festival attracts are.

However, the firm in which he is a partner has a long history of being involved in the local arts communities.

'Part of the policy of the firm is to sponsor concerts and sporting events,' he explains.

'It's very much a Devon firm, founded in 1831 and much older than most of the things we sponsor, drawing its clientele from Torquay to Exeter.

We also encourage the individual partners to participate in arts-related activities.

Robert Coram has just acted in a production of As You Like It and partner Tracey Pearce is a soprano and sang in the High Wycombe festival.' At the 'Ways with Words' festival, Woollcombe Beer Watts chose to sponsor 'Summoned by Betjeman' a production celebrating the enthusiasm, loves, fears, beliefs and jokes of the poet, set to musical accompaniment.

Mr Zahara showed his partners the programme of events for the festival, which ranged from a reading by Beryl Bainbridge, who was named author of the year at the 1999 British Book Awards and had her novel Master Georgie shortlisted for the Booker Prize, to yet another riotous poetry slam.

'The partners chose a session which they knew their clients would be interested in,' explains Mr Zahara.

'John Betjeman comes from the west country, he spent his life in Cornwall and he's definitely popular with the clients.'