When Madeleine May first took over the top job at the International Bar Association's secretariat she worked two days a week, and even on those days she was able to finish in time to collect her children from school.Nearly 15 years later the executive directorship is more than a full-time proposition.

Ms May's successor - she is retiring in a year's time - faces an extremely demanding job probably involving having to hire a nanny to collect the kids as well as thousands of miles of international air travel annually.Modesty will not allow Ms May to broadcast it too loudly, but the broadening of the IBA ambit and hence the expansion of the head job is essentially her own doing.

The daughter of a solicitor, Ms May left school at 16 with one aim in mind.

'I date from the days in which you did what your father told you to do.'She qualified as a solicitor at 20, one year before she could legally be admitted to the Roll.

A visit to the Law Society's appointments registry set her career on course.

She met the then Secretary-General, Sir Thomas Lund, who hired her as a personal assistant.When Sir Thomas took over the IBA's executive directorship in 1969, he asked her to follow him in order to edit the association's occasional newsletter.

Sir Thomas left ten years later, by which time she had become 'sucked into' the association sufficiently to be asked to succeed him.Ms May freely acknowledges that during the 1960s and 1970s the association was vastly different.

'It did not have the money to give Sir Thomas the backing and staff that was required.

So it was a rich man's club, dominated by North Americans and Europeans, with the odd Australian.'The statistics tell part of the story of change under her leadership.

When she took the job, membership was less than 3000 individuals and about 40 national Bars.

Today, the IBA claims more than 16,000 individual lawyer members from 164 countries.

More than 150 national Bars and law societies are on its books.A key to the expansion has been her determination to increase the participation of lawyers from the developing countries.

When she first became executive director, an African lawyer told her that he and his colleagues felt as though they were 'on the balcony looking down - but not part of the crowd'.

It was then 'that I resolved to make them part of the crowd'.A glance at the current membership list shows the policy to have been a success.

Nigeria contributes the eighth largest number of members as the association attempts to keep a balance of one-third North American, one-third European and one-third rest of the world.The whole organisation is now 'far more membership driven' than it was in its infancy.

Some 54 specialist committees organise their own meetings in addition to the association's annual gathering - scheduled this year for Melbourne in Australia.It has also taken a much more aggressive and campaigning role concerning the treatment of lawyers around the world.

The association fires off what seems like an incessant barrage of letters to heads of state protesting at the persecution of lawyers or abuses of judicial process.Recently, the IBA has set up a 20-member 'trial observer corps' - a sort of lawyers' flying squad - based around the world.

Members will attend trials where the IBA believes the procedures are falling short of internationally accepted standards.

A UK member of the corps, civil rights solicitor Geoffrey Bindman, will go to Malaysia next month at the invitation of the Malaysian Bar Council to observe a trial there.On the commercial side of the international legal scene, the IBA is preparing to put an oar into the rights of establishment debate.

Ms May firmly believes lawyers should be allowed to set up shop and practise wherever they choose around the world, as long as they can agree to a set of ethical rules and standards.'At the moment,' she says, 'there is a vacuum.

There needs to be a supranational body that has an ethical code on rules of establishment that will be enforced by the national Bars.

I don't know what other organisation could do that apart from the IBA.'To that end, at the beginning of June, the IBA is organising a meeting in Geneva to start the process of ha mmering out an agreement.

It has asked the American Bar Association to bring its foreign legal consultant model rule along as well as inviting the Council of Law Societies and Bars of Europe to put its draft rights of establishment directive on the table.It is extremely unlikely that such a contentious and long-running issue will be resolved after one meeting in Switzerland.

But Ms May hopes that some sort of agreement could be reached in about two years' time.

Even then, its teeth will only be as sharp as the individual national Bars allow.On a day-to-day basis, what members get from the association is a chance to meet their counterparts from around the world and pick up leads to potential business.

The IBA already publishes a directory listing individual-member areas of work and languages spoken.One of Ms May's main recommendations to whoever gets the job next year is that this information should be put on to computer database.

In five years' time, she predicts, the association will be able to provide nearly instantaneous information on its members.'If you're looking for a French speaking intellectual property lawyer specialising in trade marks in Hamburg, we will be able to find one through the database.'