In June 1991, Anne Ball, recently made up to partner in the healthcare litigation department of Hempsons' London office, went up to Manchester to cover a colleague's three-month maternity leave.

She liked working in the city so much she decided to stay.

So began a chain of causation that seven years later saw the Medical Defence Union appoint her to act as Dr Harold Shipman's solicitor.Ms Ball is accustomed to gory causation: she has always represented doctors and dentists accused of professional misconduct, but 15 charges of murder and one of fraud -- and complicated toxicological evidence -- made this case more complicated than the average.Drug levels are usually tested in blood, but thigh muscle had to be used in most of these cases because of the length of time since burial of the bodies and the fact that some of them had been embalmed.

'There is only a limited amount of data on drug testing in thigh muscles, and this had to be explored,' said Ms Ball.

'It was also accepted that toxicologists could not say what the drug levels were in the bodies at the moment of death due to the concept of post-mortem redistribution.'In terms of medical causation, the Shipman investigation was not an 'exceptional case,' contends Ms Ball.

Nor is she a stranger to murder -- or 'white coat' crime, as it is known in the medical world.

She has acted for a doctor accused of murdering her own child, and her previous criminal cases have included medical manslaughter, rape, indecent assault, fraud and drug-related offences.Hempsons is a noted firm in this area.

One of Ms Ball's colleagues acted for Dr Dave Moor, acquitted last May of killing a patient in a case that sparked a national debate on euthanasia.

The firm also acted in the celebrated 1950s case of Dr Bodkin Adams, accused of murdering patients to benefit from their wills.

That case has regularly been compared with that of Dr Shipman, although Dr Bodkin Adams was acquitted.However much Ms Ball may be used to grisly medical detail, no case she has worked on has attracted so much publicity.

She was appointed to act for Dr Shipman on 1 August 1998, the day when the police both exhumed the body of Kathleen Grundy and attended Dr Shipman's surgery with a search warrant.

The 12 exhumations, between August and December 1998, were the first carried out by the Greater Manchester Police for 26 years.Dr Shipman was charged with Kathleen Grundy's death and the forgery of her will on 7 September 1998.

On remand between 5 October 1998 and 22 February 1999, the doctor was arrested four times and charged with 14 additional murders.

Did Ms Ball have any idea where the tally would end? Were there channels of communication between her and the prosecution? 'I had absolutely no more idea than the next person,' she says.

'I was reading the papers as avidly as anyone else.'By the time of the first charges in September 1998, the media interest had already snowballed and the momentum was maintained up to and through the trial.

The opening media shots are still a sore issue.

She says: 'Some of the reporting at the time of the exhumations was prejudicial, and formed the basis of an abuse argument at the outset of the trial.' She contends that media exaggeration of the number of murder charges planned by the police (up to 150), compared with the 15 charges actually laid, could have influenced the jury.'It could be a ground of appeal,' she adds.

Dr Shipman has 28 days to lodge an appeal and Ms Ball says her client is 'still considering it'.The publicity was not helped, she adds, by the fact that some of the exhumations coincided with the days of Dr Shipman's court appearances.

Asked if this might have been timed by the police to rattle her client, she replies enigmatically: 'I wouldn't like to comment at present.'But Ms Ball is complimentary about the reporters who covered the trial itself: 'They were reporting a story for their readers.

They respected that we had our job to do and generally left us alone.' She was 'approached a lot' for interviews and statements during the trial -- when it would have been highly unprofessional to comment -- but she says: 'Once I'd emphasised my position to the media, no one tried to put pressure on me.'How does she respond to those non-lawyers who think that people like Shipman do not deserve legal representation? 'No one would criticise a doctor who rendered a defendant medical treatment, or a newspaper vendor who sold him a paper .

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it is essential for the workings of the judicial system that those charged should be represented.'She believes it is a credit to solicitors that no defendant fails to find a lawyer.

'I may turn a client away because their work is not the sort of work I do, but I don't turn clients away because I don't like the sound of their story.'This was a case involving more than 100 witnesses of fact and expert evidence in relation to pathology, toxicology, toxicology in hair, anaesthetics, general practice, neurosurgery, document analysis, fingerprints and computers.

Unsurprisingly, Ms Ball says that organisation is at the heart of being able to deal with such a volume of information.

Information technology is just a tool, not the answer, she warns.

'Just as you could drown in pieces of paper, you can also lose control of data.

If you lay down proper systems of data organisation in the first place and stick to them rigidly, it goes smoothly and other members of the team are able to find things that you have stored.' Teamwork is the other crucial factor, she says -- apart from counsel Nicola Davies QC and Ian Winter, Ms Ball was assisted by solicitor John Fitzpatrick, and Katherine Sheldrick, a trainee with a PhD in biochemistry.

They all 'worked together very well', she says.But behind the cool professional, does a case so macabre and time-consuming not become depressing? 'I am used to dealing with traumatic cases -- premature deaths and brain damaged-victims -- and my two young children have ways of working their interests to the forefront of my mind, enabling me to shift my focus and relax.'