This is a week for stating the obvious. Extolling the importance of judicial diversity earlier this week, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, said: “Every human being is a unique human being. And because every human being is a unique human being, we are all different in one way or another. Some of the ways are obvious. There are adults and children. There are men and women.” So let me state something that at least appears obvious. The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) is a public interest regulator. It behoves such an organisation to be open and transparent wherever possible. Yesterday I witnessed an example of the SRA doing everything but that. Yes, I’m afraid that I am back on my longstanding hobby horse of transparency (or lack of it) in the legal profession.

What would happen if a number of firms in a county decided that the best way to face the future was to specialise in a specific area of work? If they each agreed which practice areas they would cover with each other and agreed to work reciprocally? If they cross-referred to each other with the aim of dominating their local area?

I can say with a degree of confidence that most delegates at Monday’s Legal Futures conference had an enjoyable and stimulating day (to judge by the evaluation forms, subsequent e-mails and the Twitter stream for #lfconf). From learning what is happening in the here and now to a mind-expanding closing presentation from Daniel Katz of Michigan State University, on his vision of legal information engineering and quantitative legal prediction (ie, using data to predict the outcome of legal matters), there was no shortage of food for thought. Various common themes struck me, irrespective of where the speaker was coming from.

It has been a week of strong words. First of all we had Bar Council chairman Michael Todd QC sounding off about the Legal Services Board, and then on Tuesday Solicitors Regulation Authority chairman Charles Plant was uncompromising about his view of the “small but significant” number of solicitors who are not good enough to be in practice. Let’s start with Mr Plant, who does like to drop the occasional grenade to liven things up. In some ways it is hardly controversial to suggest that out of nearly 130,000 practising solicitors, there are some bad apples – but the problem appears a lot bigger than that.

Posted by Barbara Hamilton-Bruce, director of operations at Accident Advice Helpline: I regularly sit down with people from teams across the business to talk about the performance of law firms on our panel and firms that have made enquiries about membership. One of the agenda subjects is ‘quality’. It’s a hard thing to define but generally we are asking ourselves ‘does what we have learnt since the last meeting that may change our view of any of our panel firms, past or present?’. We talk about many things but pay a lot of attention to customer feedback, good and bad.