The growth in legal practice courses being tailored to specific areas of practice - now targeting would-be legal aid lawyers - will only fuel the claims of those who say solicitors are no longer one profession.

What do the 1 million-a-year partner in the City and the legal aid practitioner scraping a living in north Wales really have in common?

Of course, they may have been in the same class at law school, and remain bound together by the same professional rules, although the problems commercial firms have encountered with the conflicts rule, for example, have not been mirrored in publicly funded work.

And fragmentation is not always along such stark lines - conveyancers and personal injury specialists clashed over referral fees, with the former being the most vocal opposition and the latter leading the charge in favour.

The current regulation of legal services mixes provider and service-based rules.

Whatever the outcome of the Clementi review, this overall picture is unlikely to change significantly.

In fact, Sir David highlights one of the advantages of model A - which would see a legal services authority regulating all lawyers - as 'consistency of rules and standards across the professions and services'.

The solicitor of the future may continue as a member of one profession, but that lawyer will be much different from the more generalist predecessor of 50 years ago - a change some may understandably mourn, but a change that nonetheless seems inevitable.