In the final part of her series looking at the profession's development, Elizabeth Cruickshank tells of how, from 1979, successive governments have taken an increasing interest in lawyers

'We can be over-sensitive about the sniping to which we are from time to time subjected and which does not represent a true picture of what our clients think of us.

We should seek to show what we can and actually do for the public rather than spend too much time answering petty criticisms.'

So said Law Society President EH Singleton in 1974.

And over the 25 years from 1978, a succession of reports and consultation papers has subjected the legal profession to escalating, and increasingly public, scrutiny.

Much of this has been focused on the improvement and control of legal qualifications, and how far legal training of solicitors and barristers can be uniform.

The 1979 Benson Report on Legal Services, while regarding a considerable common core of subjects as being in the public interest, nevertheless concluded that there were practical problems to the introduction of common training.

Bar training was aimed at producing specialist advocates whereas the Law Society examinations were still aimed at producing general practitioners.

The bar finals contained no provision for accounts, which in itself illustrated a major difference; solicitors must inevitably, and barristers should not, have dealings with clients' money.

In 1987 the Law Society's green paper entitled 'Lawyers and the Courts: Time for Some Change' argued that 'lawyers' should qualify 'after a common training in both the academic and practical aspects of the law'.

But at the same time, Chancery Lane confirmed its rejection of common vocational training.

In 1980 the old Law Society examination system was abandoned in favour of a new finals examinations and articles were standardised at two years.

The 1988 Marre Report's recommendation that the vocational stage should concentrate more on practical skills than on substantive law eventually resulted in the legal practice course.

Compulsory continuing education was begun in 1985 further to safeguard legal standards, at first for only the first three post-qualification years, but now mandatory for all solicitors taking out practising certificates.

Since 1998, the Lexcel quality mark has been awarded to law firms as a recognition of good management systems.

This was viewed as being increasingly important for a profession where individual solicitors may now almost inadvertently find themselves in serious trouble under the new money-laundering legislation.

Managing the numbers

Recruitment and its management has been a constant problem for the profession, tellingly recorded in the annual Law Society Reports.

In 1978 'employers are generally cutting down on recruitment, due to the economic climate,' by 1985 there was 'no significant unemployment among solicitors ...

our large City firms are growing in size and number', and in 1988 there was a recruitment crisis.

'The demand for staff, particularly with specialised knowledge, continues unabated ...

As a result vacancies are increasing and firms are increasingly consulting the registry for advice on salaries and other benefits, with a view to recruiting and retaining articled clerks.'

In 1987, Slaughter & May partner Richard Harvey said that the recruitment problem 'could not be solved overnight as any decision or action taken now would not bear fruit for about five years'.

This comment had an ironic ring several years later.

In 1992 solicitors' firms embarked on substantial publicised and unpublicised redundancies, primarily as a result of the early 1990s property crash.

At the beginning of the 21st century despite an economic downturn in the City, high street practices are finding it difficult to recruit.

Law Society research conducted this year found that 'high street practices generally - and legal aid practices in particular - have great difficulty in recruiting qualified and experienced staff.

Additionally many practices cannot afford to take on trainees'.

During the same period, Clifford Chance has moved its 848 UK lawyers to Canary Wharf offices in London's Docklands, with facilities that 'will be the envy of law firms across the world for some time to come'.

The Times reported the possible prospective earnings of certain City partners over a 15-year period (10 million plus), while in the Gazette a 15-year qualified solicitor asks why he works 60 hours a week guiding clients through 'the minefield that is the law' for 30,000 a year.

The profession and its difficulties are, as ever, diverse.

Specialisation and information

In 1979 Sir Henry Benson advocated an increasingly specialised profession.

'The whole object of a profession is to ensure that people with the appropriate skills should be available to serve the public.' However, the weight of new UK and European legislation has created specialisms in ever more minute areas of law.

In larger firms' general tax advisers become corporate tax, VAT or national insurance specialists, and cross-border transactions mean that immigration and competition specialists burgeon.

This diversification requires more efficient methods of organising and communicating information.

In the seven years from 1978 the Law Society progressed from appointing a 'temporary cataloguer' to produce a 'complete card catalogue' of its library holdings, to establishing a register of those unusual animals, 'solicitors who are computer users'.

Only three years later Linklaters & Paines demonstrated the future by installing a 6 million Wang computer system, probably the largest purchased by a UK law firm at that time.

Linklaters' director of information commented that, 'although interpretation itself remains the responsibility of the professional solicitor, finding and passing it [information] on is more efficient with the use of information technology'.

Instead of jealously creating a legal mystique through impenetrable jargon, lawyers increasingly make legal information available to the lay public through the Internet, conscious that their negotiating, representational and drafting skills are ever more necessary to interpret and utilise the law for their clients.

Advanced communication systems have facilitated the integration of law firms offering 'global solutions', while laptops, sometimes armed with voice-recognition and translation software packages, have ensured that the conscientious lawyer need never really leave the office.

Even barristers have embraced the benefits of IT and with it the possibility of the 'virtual chambers', enabling them to be clerked from offices physically located some distance from their areas of practice.

Over the past ten years, new methods of organising and disseminating information and experience have also led to innovative ways of structuring legal office functions.

Professional support lawyers have increased in number, often regarded as essential team players and some have now reached senior positions of responsibility.

High street concerns

Lawyers can now advertise and incorporate, are increasingly involved in Europe, but are as ever perturbed by the position of residential conveyancing.

E-conveyancing and 'Tesco law' are merely the latest in a long line of proposed liberalisations of this aspect of legal work.

In 1983 the Law Society President sympathised with the 'considerable anxiety and a feeling of vulnerability in the minds of many solicitors' who considered that a significant proportion of their livelihood was about to be jeopardised.

Following the 1985 Farrand Report, solicitors were forced to compete first with licensed conveyancers (Administration of Justice Act 1986) and then with banks and building societies (the Building Societies Act 1986).

In 1987 legal aid passed from the supervision of the Law Society to a quango entitled the Legal Aid Board.

Once again, as the government indicated that the rates for legally aided work should not necessarily be the same as for privately funded work, solicitors suspected that they would have to fund legal aid from their own pockets.

A major 1988 survey concluded that an alarming 40% of practitioners had either given up legally aided work or were seriously considering doing so.

The Legal Aid Board had intended to franchise legal aid in both general and specialist areas by awarding franchises to firms with a legal aid turnover of at least 40,000, which would have excluded 75% of firms doing legal aid work.

The Law Society protested, pointing out that rural areas would be seriously disadvantaged by the proposal because large legal aid firms are usually situated in urban areas.

The financial qualification was dropped and now even advice agencies with a solicitor who holds a practising certificate may apply for a franchise.

The Legal Aid Board in turn handed over its responsibility for state funding of legal advice to the Legal Services Commission on 1 April 2000.

Amid concerns that the increasing costs of legal aid (1,477 million in 1997) are a lawyers' bonanza or a late-paid pittance - depending on whether the commentator is a tabloid journalist or a legal aid practitioner - many lawyers continue to provide free legal advice.

Some 800 barristers, including 130 QCs, have registered with the Bar Pro Bono Unit since 1996 to provide at least three days' free advice and assistance every year.

And many solicitors also give their services free through a diversity of organisations.

The full term, pro bono publico, for the public good, is seldom used, but it is a reminder that Latin was once a necessary educational requirement for lawyers in this country.

Relationship with the bar

In March 1984 the Law Society began its campaign for solicitors to be given rights of audience in the higher courts, because 'it is in the public interest that the skills of solicitor-advocates should be available in wider spheres'.

The Court of Appeal decision in the 1986 case of Abse v Smith - which provoked a practice direction granting solicitors very limited rights of audience in the Supreme Court - was soon followed by the Courts and Legal Services Act 1990.

This landmark legislation conferred rights on solicitors with advocacy certificates to represent their clients in the higher courts, and also gave certain professional clients direct access to the bar, privileges further extended by the Access to Justice Act 1999.

The precarious financial position of some barristers was often exacerbated by some solicitors' late payment of fees.

In 1987 the Law Society rejected the bar's request that solicitors pay counsel's fees on a quarterly basis during the course of a case even if the solicitors were not in funds.

But the Society did agree to a possible blacklist of about 200 persistently non-paying solicitors' firms, and also that it would 'exert pressure' on an offending solicitor as a last resort.

Making it a matter of professional misconduct for barristers to accept work from such firms was seriously considered.

Solicitors of course took the view that the misconduct was not one-sided, a sentiment with which the Solicitors Journal concurred: 'Solicitors should pay for work done, but there should be workable sanctions for poor quality advice and advocacy which comes all too often from the middle or lower ranks of the bar.'

It was clearly imperative that the two branches should understand each other better, and the old rules that barristers could not entertain solicitors to lunch at one of the Inns of Court - as that could be construed as touting for business - began to be relaxed.

Now there are 10,800 practising members of the bar (not including employed barristers), 3,000 of whom are women.

The proposed abolition of the appellation of Queen's Counsel seems, publicly at least, to have had more impact on the bar than the change in the position of barristers in relation to the advice that they give.

Rondell v Worsley [1969] confirmed the immunity of barristers from actions in negligence arising from their conduct during hearings and also for any connected preliminary work such as the drawing of pleadings, not because of their inability to sue for fees but on grounds of public policy.

Lord Upjohn considered that the position of solicitors was somewhat different because their relationship with their clients was contractual, so that while they might enjoy immunity while actually acting as advocates in court on behalf of their clients or settling pleadings, their immunity would not go beyond that.

Saif Ali v Sydney Mitchell & Co [1980] confirmed this.

But in 2000 the House of Lords concluded in Arthur JS Hall v Simons that it was no longer in the public interest for advocates to have immunity from suit for negligence for acts concerned with the conduct of either civil or criminal litigation.

This decision applies to both barristers and solicitors acting as advocates, although the House of Lords said that it would be no easy matter to establish such negligence.

A continuing profession?

It is difficult to predict what the profession will look like 100 years from now.

Certainly it has no shortage of recruits.

This year 20,000 applications for 12,000 university undergraduate law degree places were made; 6,646 solicitors were admitted, bringing the total number of solicitors on the roll to 111,372, and those with practising certificates to 89,045.

Some 55.6% of those new solicitors were women compared with 27.6% in 1980.

There is still considerable debate as to whether this indicates a fundamental shift in the gender demographic of the solicitors' profession that will eventually lead to an increase in the figure of 23.5% of women who are law firm partners.

Although women have been lawyers since 1922, it was not until the 1988/89 tax year that married women had the right to have their earnings separately assessed and to be separately liable for their own taxation, not treated as fiscal appendages of their husbands.

In 1987 the Association of Women Solicitors was one of the organisations that lobbied the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson on this point.

Probably a fundamental societal change in male attitudes to work and the adoption of flexible working will be necessary before the percentage of women partners increases.

What is clear is that lawyers and the legal system are subjects of constant interest in a country that values the freedom and rights of the individual - which results in ever more consultation and regulation.

Elizabeth Cruickshank is a solicitor and author of Women in the Law, published by Law Society Publishing this month