Over the last few years a growing gap has emerged between new school and old school law firms. It’s not as many predicted, in that new firms would emerge and take over the world while long-established firms would fail to respond and disappear. Far from it. Some new firms are struggling to surface above water while a number of traditional firms are finding new ways to reinvent themselves.

Eight years is a long time at the helm of an organisation like the Law Society, and so as he departs Chancery Lane as its chief executive for the last time, Des Hudson takes a lot of baggage with him. But what is the legacy of a man who started off as a breath of fresh air after taking over from the unpopular Janet Paraskeva, and ended up on the wrong end of a vote of no confidence from the profession?

It’s an important step for any business to make the decision to either fully outsource its switchboard or secure a provider to respond to overspill calls that would go otherwise unanswered – which is why you have to get it right. Times have certainly changed. Outsourcing is no longer a dirty word, with businesses large and small understanding that they can’t always do everything themselves.

At present, the main option for a group of barristers wishing formally to collaborate and share profits is to form an SRA-regulated law firm or, if non-lawyer managers are involved, an SRA-regulated alternative business structure (ABS). The impending introduction of entity regulation (and most likely ABSs) by the BSB will tip things on their head and create additional options for entrepreneurial barristers.

The recent headlines about Wonga, Lloyds and other large institutional organisations using fictitious law firms as a means of ‘upping the ante’ with debtors has really focused minds on the morals and ethics adopted by such organisations.