Solicitors play a major part in moving the legal process forward on behalf of their clients, preparing cases, and increasingly appearing as solicitor advocates; increasingly, too, as solicitors who apply to join the bench.

Even if progress is (apparently) being made in the system of judicial appointments, the Law Society still urges the Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine, to go the whole hog by setting up a judicial appointments' commission - to ensure diverse selection on the surface of a level playing-field that is visible for all to see.Information superhighwayMy greatest challenge is to be president at a time when the Law Society is on the cusp of significant change.

I want to see the Law Society re-established both internally and externally as a formidable presence on the legal landscape, valued by our members for the full range of our activities, advocating effectively their interests, and respected by stakeholders as a model regulator, maintaining our leading voice on law reform, on best practice of law, and on client care .In pursuing this aim, we must recognise that the dual responsibilities of regulation and representation are not mutually exclusive, but a mixture that is reconcilable provided that both functions are performed well - and if we cannot perform both well we should be ashamed of ourselves.We have a special responsibility to the young and new solicitors to fulfil their high hopes in the age of the Internet economy.Today, the click of a mouse can bring up the Law Society's new Web site (solicitors-online.com) which has just hit no2 in the charts of busiest legal Web sites - 2.82 million hits last month.

It is now the authoritative source for the public to find a solicitor, the specialist firm, the nearest firm, even the virtual solicitor's office.With true modernising spirit, government policy includes widening IT access for the public to give better access to justice through the community legal service.Excellent though that concept may be, the fact remains that much of the time there is still no substitute for direct advice.

Access to justice cannot always be dematerialised from screen to screen.

Direct representation when the clients' questions are answered and minds put at rest cannot always be found at the end of a modem.Lawyers in the communityNowhere is compassion and understanding more evident than in the excellent daily work of the family law solicitor, emphatically confirmed by research from the Nuffield Foundation into the role and task that family lawyers perform.

The authors of the study explode the myth that there is anything fundamentally flawed in the way lawyers deal with family breakdown.

They found that:-- Solicitors discourage clients from making unreasonable claims;-- When children are involved, solicitors routinely encourage the parties to agree between themselves rather than using lawyers unnecessarily;-- Solicitors actively discourage tit- for-tat attitudes in family disputes.The survey found much more to confirm the invaluable role of family lawyers ,whose pivotal position in the community legal service must quickly be recognised by the incentive of a long overdue increase in hourly rates.

Frankly, unless the government and the Legal Services Commission provide proper incentives for firms to continue doing this crucial public work these 'thin cat' - to quote The Guardian - community lawyers will vote with their feet.

It will then be too late for the Lord Chancellor to remember what he said to the North Yorkshire Business Forum on 16 June 2000: 'I would like to correct one myth.

On the whole, lawyers working on legal-aid rates are not the fat cats of the legal system.

Many are dedicated, efficient, caring individuals, providing important services to the poor and disadvantaged'.I agree.

But those words must be followed up with more resources, otherwise the watershed moment that I have warned the Lord Chancellor about will become a reality.

It cannot be in the public interest to play the brinkmanship of seeing how far community lawyers (often in small firms) can be pushed - and that includes the not-for-profit sector, which employs many poorly-paid and highly- committed solicitors.Even worse is the current plight of criminal practitioners contemplating the proposed terms of the criminal defence service contracts and the salaried defence service pilots.Throughout, the Law Society has insisted that if there is to be a Salaried Defence Service, it must include equality of arms between prosecution and defence, guaranteed freedom of choice for clients, and a level playing-field between private pr actice firms and the Salaried Defence Service firm.How can goodwill for this policy be engendered by the seductive language of the Legal Service Commission's advertisement for the salaried defence service, which says 'we would also be interested to hear from applicants who would bring an existing base of clients or an established criminal defence team'? At a salary of £50,000 plus benefits, when their current practices are hanging on by a thin financial thread because of no meaningful increase in rates for eight years, it will be a strong temptation to jump ship.What will the competition lawyers have to say? Is this a level playing field, particularly when the contract is completely silent about money? There is plenty in it about more administrative work, about no additional payment for being on duty for up to 24 hours at a time, about greater restrictions on how much work can be done or paid for - but nothing about rates of pay.

How can the commission expect firms to embrace, or even to consider the contract details and make their business plans if they don't know what rates of payment to expect? Rates have increased since 1992 by only 5% - against an increase in overheads of 30%.

Is it any wonder that overdraft limits, redundancies and recruitment problems are the daily talk of criminal lawyers?Reach out and reformThe Law Society's office holder team has adopted the approach of doing what Basil Fawlty described as 'the bleeding obvious' - talking to the leaders, the groups, the associations, the City, the senior partners and the opinion formers, and above all making the effort to get out of Chancery Lane and listen to firms of all sizes.

This is all timely because we have a serious agenda to discuss - the radical, even revolutionary, reform programme set out in the consultation paper that every solicitor received as a pull-out supplement to the 19 October issue of the Gazette.The proposals recognise that only five years ago the profession voted in a ballot to maintain the dual roles of regulation and representation, a view that has been confirmed by qualitative focus group research, and reaffirmed by the council several times.

The need to do better in all areas of the Society's activities is at the forefront of the council's carefully thought through and concerted reform programme, which is designed to strengthen the profession's customer-focused stance and its own standing in the eyes of government and stakeholders, who are all quick to remind us that self-regulation is a privilege that can be taken away and not a right to be taken for granted.Another plank of the reform process is to produce a body that is relevant to solicitors as a streamlined and efficient decision- making organisation based on a corporate model, consistent with the way that any small plc would expect to run its business.

The reform process is not a leap in the dark.

Many people have worked hard to get this far.

If the mood of the profession says we have got it right, the framework can be put in place at a special general meeting in February, with a larger council that is more representative of our membership, acting as a platform for stronger links with the profession.

The standards focus of the reforms will soon be delivered by a new and simplified modern rulebook during 2001.Yes minister?We have designed a fresh Law Society.

One that will allow us when appropriate to show welcome agreement with the Lord Chancellor, who said last February in the Financial Times that he 'wanted to see a strong, independent and articulate Law Society because it was in the public interest that a great and important profession consisting of 90,000 solicitors should give a good account of itself in the public interest'.There are many areas where, despite a robust relationship on some issues, we can enjoy a mutually beneficial relationship with the government.

I welcome, for example, the efforts of the Lord Chancellor's Department to open new areas for English and Welsh lawyers abroad.

The Law Society's international expert help on those missions is invaluable and it helps to bring home the bacon - about £720 million annually in overseas invisible earnings.

I also welcome the letter that arrived from the parliamentary secretary, David Lock, announcing an initiative to reduce the paperwork bureaucracy for firms dealing with the Legal Services Commission.

I also have confidence in a fair and sensible outcome of the advanced negotiations with the Lord Chancellor on the content of the compulsory elements of the practising certificate fee.However, I fear the government may have to think again about its rules and regulations on conditional fees where recoverability of the success fee and the insurance premium was offered as the plug to fill the gap of removal of legal aid in personal injury cases.

The news that defendant insurers will, as they are entitled to do, challenge premium recovery in all cases where there are no proceedings could scupper the whole process, simultaneously sabotaging Lord Woolf's civil justice reforms that encourage early settlement with litigation as the last resort.

It will be ludicrous if, in a claim which would otherwise settle, the claimant has to issue proceedings to recover the insurance premium.

We warned the LCD about this problem and raised it during the passage of the access to justice bill, asking for clarity that recoverability would apply regardless of the issue of proceedings, but to no avail - and it now looks as if we are heading for high volumes of satellite litigation.Client careFor the umpteenth time I want to stress that treating clients well, so that they do not complain - or if they do, handling the complaint properly- does not require a PhD in rocket science.

By putting our clients first, as we are required to do, and by marketing our self-regulated status we can distinguish solicitors from the growing band of unqualified competitors, who are offering legal services today with their aggressive techniques.By excellent practice management standards such as Lexcel, by being transparent about fees, by being available and affordable and by giving value for money we can easily distinguish ourselves from the competition and readily cope with the understandable tendency of clients to complain if their reasonable expectations are not met - sometimes even if their unreasonable expectations are not met.

When that happens we should be prepared if necessary to say that small but important word 'sorry' and to do our utmost to put right what may have gone wrong or, just as likely, what is thought to have gone wrong but is often more perceived than real.In August and September this year in 1,500 telephone interviews, independent researchers asked clients what they thought about their solicitors.

The Law Society commissioned the research.

The findings are encouraging.

But while we should celebrate these findings we cannot ease up on improving the client care culture.The small percentage of time when we don't quite satisfy the client has a high reputation cost and a high business cost.

Solicitors must be affordable, efficient, approachable and fair - sensi tive to the fact that like any other business the customer is king.

Moreover, the Law Society's drive to promote practice excellence will help those firms which have a poor complaints record.Polluter paysTo square the circle, I make no apology for introducing the polluter pays principle as part of the Law Society reform agenda.

It is included in the consultation paper and I shall be surprised if the profession does not support the idea that those who do not cause complaints should not be expected to bear all the financial burden of handling the complaints of those who do.We now stand more than a fighting chance of meeting the December numbers target at the Office for the Supervision of Solicitors - where there is no longer a backlog of files waiting for caseworker allocation.Polluter pays will reduce the flow of complaints because it will encourage firms to deal with them at source.

And, if the reform proposals for a lay commissioner-led redress scheme are supported, the OSS will achieve quicker resolution of service complaints through a conciliatory approach, complaints that currently make up 60% of the OSS workload.

One final thing is clear - in adjudicating complaints the OSS is totally independent.

But the responsibility for ensuring that there is an efficient complaints handling system rests squarely on the shoulders of the Society on behalf of the profession and the public.I am confident that we can deliver a new Law Society to help our members serve their clients.

We can make a difference and we can all share in the success.

That excites me as president and, consistent with my favourite aphorism that 'the less we worry about who takes the credit the more we get things done'.

I wrote in The Times a couple of weeks ago that 'I want all solicitors to share in the buzz of making it happen'.

It is crucial that you do and I hope you will.-- For a full copy of this speech, contact 020 7320 5810.