We are now a little over two years since the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) began accepting applications from would-be alternative business structures (ABSs), and a little under two years since it issued the first licenses. I have a sense that some are disappointed by what has happened since then. In the main they shouldn’t be – the transient nature of news, I think, has made people forget just how many interesting and different legal services providers have emerged in the last two years. But from one perspective, and I will come back to this later, I can see their point.

What would you call a person who knows a couple of thousand local people and businesses that would make great clients for your firm and who are not? You probably call them ‘my accountant’, or maybe the chamber of commerce, or the local estate agents, the secondary school. All of these will have contacts with hundreds or thousands of people who could be clients for your firm and who are not – and they are local. People want advice delivered locally. Most firms could quadruple the size of their businesses, without having to gain new clients more than 30 minutes travel time from their offices. This is how.

Let’s not underestimate the pace of change in the legal regulatory landscape over the past couple of years. Developments have been unprecedented, relentless and, at times, frustrating. 2014 is set to be another busy year for compliance officers with yet more regulatory upheaval. And it all kicks off in January with a review of the compliance officer for finance and administration (COFA) role.

After what seems an all too brief season of peace and goodwill, hostilities between the government and criminal lawyers have rapidly resumed, and appear to have taken a more sinister turn. With a strike by criminal barristers across England and Wales looming, the Ministry of Justice chose the first working day of 2014 for a not-so-subtle pre-emptive ‘strike’ of its own by releasing figures detailing the earnings of criminal barristers in 2012/2013.

Over the holidays, I came across the course notes for a course I attended in February 2102. It was called ‘Introduction to probate’ and was run under the auspices of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW). Page 1 of the course notes, and, as I recall, about the first 20 minutes of the speaker’s talk, referred to the “many opportunities arising from these additional services”. That the opening up of probate to members of the ICAEW is regarded as a potential bonanza for the accountancy profession is not in doubt.