Young solicitors in the 1990s may be profoundly disillusioned, powerless and exhausted junior partners, but the pressure they are under would be reduced if their firms were better managed, says the chairman of the Young Solicitors Group (YSG), Lucy Winskell.Last year's YSG conference, 'Quality of life', focused on the problems of stress, overwork and professional dissatisfaction faced by individual solicitors aged from 25 to 36.

This June's conference, 'Practice made perfect', will look at their wider working environment.

'We want to see how practices can get the best out of their young lawyers and improve those lawyers' lives as well,' says Ms Winskell.As an example of the problems faced by young solicitors, Ms Winskell describes the case of a woman salaried partner in a medium-sized firm, whom she stresses is not her.

'When this woman's firm merged she didn't even know the merger was taking place,' says Ms Winskell.

'When she found out she had grave reservations about the firm they were merging with because of her professional dealings with them.

She was fed up.

To the outside world, and to most of the staff in a firm, salaried partners are part of the partnership.

In my own firm, my secretary expects me to know about every single decision the partnership makes, but I don't.

You feel very frustrated.

The way the current partnership structure is you feel put upon and taken for granted.

It's a bit like working for a secret society.

Young solicitors are looking to see whether the way we work in partnerships is not outdated.'Ms Winskell, who is a partner at Newcastle upon Tyne firm Wilkinson Maughan, says that one of the aims of the YSG conference is to consider what could replace the partnership model.

Another is to learn to cope with work pressures by changing to more flexible ways of working and educating clients to accept this.'We don't manage our staff as well as we might and we don't work in teams in the way that we might do to share the load,' says Ms Winskell.

'We have senior partners doing work which a junior member of staff could keep ticking over, but the senior partner is unwilling to relinquish what he regards as his client.

Clients need to be educated so that you can tell them that you won't be in on Thursday afternoon but that they can speak to one of your colleagues.'Ms Winskell says that if the current working environment does not change, good quality young solicitors will either move to in-house positions or leave the profession altogether.

'Being in employment is definitely becoming an attractive option to young lawyers,' she says.

'You are more highly regarded and more part of it all.'-- Gerald Riskin will be the keynote speaker at the Gazette-sponsored YSG conference in June (see below).

He is a pioneer in the field of law office economics and marketing.

A Canadian, he co-founded the Edge Group, which works with law firms in the USA, the UK (where his clients include top City firms), Europe, Canada and the Far East.

His 'Rainmaking' package, a video-based programme used by law firms to train their staff in client relations skills, is used by nearly 200 law firms worldwide.Mr Riskin says that there are solutions available to young lawyers who have found that getting a job with a law firm is not an automatic ro ute to a positive career.

'Each client has a huge selection when choosing a lawyer, so the answer is always to be the one who possesses skills that are invaluable to clients,' he says 'Being the best means more than it used to mean.

It relates to how we deliver to clients.'In his interactive session at the YSG conference he plans to discuss management, for example how to get a group of lawyers working as a team.

'This includes some understanding of what motivates a lawyer to do things,' he says.

'Money is a significant issue but if it is already somewhere in the right range it is not as big a motivator as the lawyer being allowed to do the kind of work he or she wants.'I will also get very specific about the skills which young lawyers can consider acquiring.

It's unrealistic to expect them to go back to their law firms and tell the senior people how to manage them.

But I will attempt to lay out a pattern for them so that when they do get involved in managing others they can influence the management process rather than simply participating in it.'One of the 14 skills Mr Riskin teaches is how to manage client expectations.

'Often the client will measure the lawyers' performance with a rule that is neither fair nor appropriate,' he says.

'The skill is for the lawyer to help the client establish an appropriate ruler to measure their performance.'An example of this is making sure the client understands the time frame to which the lawyer is working.

'Covering that issue with clients means that 20 days after meeting the lawyer one client will be satisfied after having heard nothing because he or she knows why that is, and another will be convinced the lawyer has forgotten he or she exists.'Mr Riskin's own performance comes highly commended.

The Law Society's head of public relations, Sue Stapely, says 'As a speaker Mr Riskin uses parts of your brain that other speakers don't reach.'