As a conveyancing solicitor with 25 years' experience, I hope I am qualified to take issue with Peter Scott's gloomy but inaccurate assessment of the future for small firms (see [2003] Gazette, 23 October, 14).

We already have volume-led factory conveyancers, and as evidenced by comments in your letters columns they are clearly not the future.

The idea that the complexities of conveyancing can be dealt with more cheaply by people with no legal qualifications, and that you can compare this with high street retailing, is not only laughable, it is the road to ruin.

Regrettably, the Law Society continues to encourage this sort of attitude: its Guide to Buying a Home contains the words 'before you decide who to use, check with a few firms of solicitors to compare their fees'.

Needless to say these have gone in my bin, not to my clients.

And for Mr Scott to say that only bigger firms can be more efficient and build in proper risk management is also wildly off the mark.

My firm achieves both by employing solicitors - you know, those people who are really quite good at being efficient and identifying risk because they have undergone years of training and tuition.

It is about time that everyone, including the Office of Fair Trading and the Law Society, remembered that conveyancing requires skill and detailed legal knowledge, and stopped trying to give the impression that it is no more complicated than selling a packet of crisps.

Nick Hutchinson, Nick Hutchinson & Co, Cheltenham