After three months of conditional fees in personal injury cases I think we can safely say that clients appear to like them; solicitors are operating them; and the leaders of both branches of the profession are still dubious about them.So who is living in the real world? When we know that less than 50% of the population is too 'rich' for legal aid yet too 'poor' to fund litigation out of its own pocket and no more legal aid money is available we can hardly be surprised that many accident victims expect the legal profession to provide the no win, no fee service that they want.But the public would be unimpressed to hear of the inability of the Bar and the Law Society to reach agreement on a single document that barristers and solicitors can use in conditional fee cases.

This 'divide' resulted in two separate model agreements and separate advice, the Law Society's guidance to solicitors being published in the Gazette but the Bar's advice being privately communicated to heads of chambers.Fortunately this unsatisfactory situation may be close to solution as a result of a joint initiative between the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers (APIL) which represents solicitors and barristers, and the Personal Injury Bar Association (PIBA) whose chairman is Daniel Brennan QC.

Together APIL and PIBA have produced a single model agreement that both branches of the profession can use in a suitably flexible form to allow solicitors' firms and chambers to negotiate and adapt as they wish.Copies are now with the Bar Council and the Law Society for endorsement and provided this is given everyone can soon be working from the same model documentation.

Each professional body/association can then provide guidance to its members, for example on the controversial (and optional) clause which will determine whether or not the agreement is a binding contract.

Views on this will differ but it was s.61 of the Courts and Legal Services Act 1990 which removed the prohibition on counsel entering into a contract for the provision of services and some may be content to do so.It was good to hear Bar Chairman Peter Goldsmith QC say in his speech to the Law Society's conference that: 'We must spend less time blaming each other and more time working together.' But there were still some worrying negative comments at the Bar's conference.

The Law Society's President, writing in The Times in August, said that he did not believe conditional fees represented a great step forward (allegedly measured by 'the laws of the free market and consumerism').

He linked them with 'Thatcher world'.

Surprisingly, he also diluted his initial repugnance to the sale of names of accident victims for £1 by a marketing agency which had prompted him, like APIL, to call for the publicity code to be reviewed, which is still necessary.It can only be hoped that in the interests of clients conditional fees will be supported by the leaders of both branches of the profession at least until the first results of the Lord Chancellor's monitoring process are available.

We can then examine the new regime objectively in the light of experience.Less than a month after the Lord Chancellor signed the regulations permitting conditional fees for the first time in England and Wales we saw the most offensive form of ambulance chasing yet seen in this country.

A marketing firm, it will be recalled, which had identified accident victims by use of a general questionnaire, was selling those names to solicitors at £1 per head.Many remain sceptical that condit ional fees will actually increase access to justice except to lead to the sort of US-style speculative litigation which should not be encouraged.Apologist for the kind of marketing described above will claim that it is only helping people know their rights.

Of course people must know their rights; it is meaningless to have rights otherwise.

But is it really credible that people living in this country do not know that, if injured in an accident which was somebody else's fault, they can sue?I strongly suspect most solicitors will want nothing to do with this sort of tactic.

They will believe that cold calling on potential clients or competing with other firms to sign up lucrative plaintiffs is hard to reconcile with the professionalism lawyers aspire to.I believe this will be true of the Bar too.

The conditional fees regulations apply equally to the Bar but the implications for barristers and solicitors taking on cases on a conditional fee basis are not necessarily the same.The Bar Council has produced notes for guidance for barristers asked to do a case on a conditional fee basis.

It has also produced model terms to apply where the client agrees to the Law Society's model terms.

These were discussed openly and fully with the Society over a long period of time.A barrister may be engaged either on a conventional non-conditional fee basis, in which case his fees are disbursements payable by the solicitors in the ordinary way, or on a conditional fee agreement basis.

Although a barrister is obliged by the cab-rank rule in the ordinary way to take on cases in his normal sphere of practice (subject to the conventional exceptions of conflict etc) he is not obliged to take on the case on a conditional fee basis.The Bar's model terms are no more than that: model terms.

Further discussions may lead to amendments but the form of conditional fee agreement is a matter for individual negotiation and agreement in each case.

If the barrister of preference will not take on the case on terms which the solicitors and their clients will accept, they will have to look elsewhere -- always remembering the solicitor's duty only to instruct appropriately qualified counsel.

Once an agreement has been concluded, however, then the terms of that agreement should be respected and should be enforced.Reported comments from Law Society officials that agreements containing terms from the Bar's model terms will not be enforced through the normal mechanisms operating between barristers and solicitors are disquieting.

As all solicitors know, by rule 21.08 of the solicitors code of conduct solicitors are liable as a matter of professional conduct for payment of counsel's fees.Let us hope that with continuing discussions, sense will prevail and that the professional respect and responsibility which barristers and solicitors have traditionally shown each other will not be undermined by the coming of conditional fees.