With ever-increasing financial pressure being felt across the legal industry, never has it been more important for firms and providers to have a proper understanding and handle on their cost base and on all the options available to them. One of these options is outsourcing. It is possible to make significant cost savings through outsourcing some (even much) of the work that is currently done in-house. Wherever you look these days, solicitors and legal providers are bombarded with advertisements and promises about outsourcing. And the potential is huge with pretty much everything up for grabs.

So here we are, 18 months since the onset of alternative business structures, but has private equity money been flooding into the sector? It was never going to be a tidal wave, as the very nature of private equity is that only measured investment decisions are taken, and it’s linked but separate from the venture capital world where of 10 technology start-up investments, nine are expected to fail in the hope that one becomes a Facebook or a Google. With private equity it’s generally later-stage companies that are invested in, that have a proven track record and room for growth. Every investment is fully expected to succeed.

David Wolfe QC of Matrix Chambers argues: We will never get close to having an “independent, strong, diverse and effective legal profession” (which section 1 of the Legal Services Act 2007 sets as a regulatory objective for the regulators) if advocates providing a high-quality service to their clients remain undermined by others who are not even competent. Let’s not fool ourselves: we all know lawyers – including barristers, and including criminal advocates – who are just not up to it (perhaps they never were, perhaps they have lost their touch) at all levels, from magistrates’ court practitioners to QCs.

It is hard to feel sorry for senior law academics in these difficult economic times, with their secure, publicly-funded jobs and pensions, plus impressive career autonomy. But one had to sympathise a little with professors Richard Moorhead and David Kershaw – respectively of UCL and LSE – when they put forward the notion that transactional lawyers should have to bear responsibility for competent advice they give being used unlawfully. It has the appearance of an idea whose time is perhaps some way off. Courageously, they argue that giving advice and walking away from the consequences is against the public interest and at least should be the subject of regulatory intervention.

We are long overdue for lawyers and clients to work together more collaboratively in order to take the relationship to a more grown-up place and away from the current paradigm which is redolent of a couple of snot-nosed pre-schoolers sitting in a day-care sandpit flicking dog poo at one another with their plastic spades. The solicitor/client relationship can only evolve and develop, like every relationship, if it is founded on mutual trust, courtesy, respect and a desire to broaden the scope, breadth and depth of that relationship.