The good news for young solicitors is that the wholesale redundancies which hit the profession three years ago appears to have abated.

The bad news is that working conditions are increasingly demanding and stressful.

Practising as a solicitor is, for many, the fast route to nervous breakdown or coronary heart disease.

Or so it seems to Lucy Winskell, who became chairwoman of the Young Solicitors Group last week.In the darkest days of the recession, the group carved a role for itself as an advice agency and shoulder to cry on for dozens of its members who found themselves unceremoniously out on their ears.

'They would go out to lunch on Friday afternoon only to return to the office to be told to clear their desks on the spot,' recalls Ms Winskell.The YSG's redundancy helpline fielded hundreds of telephone calls from distressed and, in some cases, seriously depressed young solicitors.

Today, the helpline is still in business but the nature of the calls has shifted.Ms Winskell illustrates the change in tone -- and the fact that firms of all sizes are affected -- with three cases.

One involved a London legal aid lawyer who was on four separate duty solicitor schemes.

'She never had a night off,' says Ms Winskell.

'And the partners were pressing her to do even more work.

When she told them she could not take on any more, they tut-tutted.'Another recent helpline caller was a woman solicitor in charge of a branch office in one of the rougher parts of the capital.

One secretary was on maternity leave and the other on long-term sick leave.

The office had been burgled several times and, whenever the solicitor had a client interview, she had to lock all the doors to prevent the typewriters from being stolen.

Finally, a young male solicitor has been on to the helpline in floods of tears.

'He was close to a nervous breakdown,' says Ms Winskell, because he was forced into a field of law he had not been originally hired to work in and internal family politics at the firm were affecting his career advancement.'Most people just want to talk to someone who is totally unrelated to their specific circumstances,' she explains.

'We speak to them for half an hour at a time during the day and then ring them back at night to make sure they have not stuck their head in the gas oven.'Indeed, quality of life -- hackneyed and nebulous phrase that it is -- has been adopted by the YSG as a subject all its own.

One of Ms Winskell's main projects for her year in office will be to build on the quality of life conference the group ran in Nottingham earlier this year.She wants to stage another more focused session devoted specifically to management skills -- or the lack of them -- in law firms.

The group is also set to publish a book on quality of life and management issues.

It will be written by solicitor-cum-organisational psychologist Catherine Berney and edited by YSG immediate past-chair Andy Unger.The book, which will be given a high-profile launch at this year's solicitors conference in Birmingham, is described by its author as 'a handbook for individual practitioners which will provoke awareness and thought about the fundamental economic and social changes affecting the future of the profession'.Ms Winskell is planning for the YSG to make a big splash at Birmingham this year.

She is adamant that a younger element must be enticed to the annual conference if the sessions are to have any relevance.

Ms Winskell herself has bagged a leading role at this year's event.

She, along with the Law Society President, Vice-President and Secretary-General, will be on the panel for the question and answer plenary session.

It will be a 'fly by the seat of y our pants' affair, Ms Winskell says, and one to which she is looking forward.Two other areas which the new chairwoman wants to focus on over the coming 12 months are alternative dispute resolution and higher court audience rights.

Both, she says, need to be adopted with enthusiasm by the younger profession.To promote the former, the YSG leadership has lined up meetings with ADR specialists CIDA in an attempt to hammer out a deal which would see group members trained as mediators.Higher court audience rights is an area in which the group has been a bit lax, says Ms Winskell, who is contemplating making an application.

'It is a wonderful opportunity which we are not grabbing.

Solicitors' work is being stolen all the time from all sorts of sources so we have got to fight back and grab what work there is.'In many ways, Ms Winskell -- a civil litigation specialist with Newcastle firm Wilkinson Maughan -- has the ideal qualifications to lead the group.

At 31 she is the youngest solicitor to take the YSG chair.

She is also one of four women partners at a firm which Ms Winskell describes as having a progressive approach towards flexible working patterns.

'When I applied for articles ten year ago there were no lady partners at any Newcastle firm except this one.

The firm is very good with their female partners -- the other three all have children and they have all structured different child care arrangements.'The firm also has a long history of Law Society involvement, proving to be a bit of a breeding ground for leading lights.

Its senior partner, Sir Derek Bradbeer, is a former Chancery Lane President and another partner, Michael Ord, recently led the YSG.

In fact Ms Winskell shares some of her predecessor's passion for Newcastle United FC, although she admits she prefers the corporate boxes to the terraces at St James' Park.

'I got into football later in life,' she admits, 'It was more practice development than true support.'Chancery Lane politics are currently a tender subject for Ms Winskell.

The recent presidential electioneering, she believes, 'has made solicitors look stupid'.

Ms Winskell points out that the group as a whole backed no specific candidate, but neither she nor Mr Unger disguised their support for the establishment Hodge-Aucott ticket.Nonetheless, the process itself has far from cheered Ms Winskell: 'The personal sniping that has gone on has been appalling.

To the public -- which hates lawyers anyway -- it just appears to be undignified in-fighting.' She speculates that a tidier system would be one where the profession is asked to elect the Deputy Vice-President each year and that person would then move up the ladder to President in the normal way.