I was interested by Ian Kinloch’s letter in which he refers to a German solicitor being addressed as Herr Doktor. I hold the Institute of Linguists diploma in French and liaised with a monolingual French notaire on behalf of a client buying a holiday home in the Dordogne. Leaving aside the problem of phoning the notaire around lunchtime, the letters and faxes addressed me as ‘Mon cher Maître’. So you would be a master in France and a doctor in Germany or Italy.

It may not be an accident that on the same page, there is a letter pointing out an insidious tendency to talk about our ‘customers’ and ‘consumers’ rather than ‘clients’, solicitors dealing in ‘products’, and so on. We seem, unlike medical doctors, to let others apart from legislators have quite a hand in our stature and destiny. There seems to be a contrast between how lawyers are addressed in France, Germany and Italy, and how we in this country are being subtly drawn down a path of deprofessionalisation.

David Mclean, Walsall