Any form of growth requires funding. Traditionally law firms have funded growth (or in some cases losses) from the high street banks. We have all recognised that this option no longer exists – or does it? The reality is that if you have a good solid history and a sound business plan, then most of the banks will still provide this badly needed access to capital. If you are not so fortunate, how are you going to expand without investing either your own cash, or someone else’s?

Andrew Whitehouse of corporate finance house Smith Square Partners – which is targeting the legal market after tying up with ABS Advisory Partners – says that with consolidation set to accelerate, converting to a corporate structure is the best way for law firms to take advantage of it

Governance seems to be the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s new favourite word. It crops up in the most fashionable parts of the SRA Handbook – in her latest blog on COLPs and COFAs, Allison Wooddisse, head of Legal Futures Associate LexisPSL Practice Compliance, tries to work out what the SRA means when it talks about law firms’ governance.

Many of the lawyers who have only just woken up to the prospect of non-lawyer ownership of firms (a sizeable group, I’d wager) generally react with horror. The argument I hear all the time – exemplified by the letter signed by nine general counsel in the US – is that it will dilute the professionalism of lawyers, damage the lawyer-client relationship and lead to dastardly non-lawyers strong-arming lawyers to put profit before ethics.

If we are to judge the success of a regulator by the degree to which it really annoys those it regulates, then the Legal Services Board (LSB) has done an absolutely bang-up job these past three years. It is just over 12 months since I first blogged about whispers questioning the long-term need for the LSB once independent regulation, the Legal Ombudsman and alternative business structures were all up and running. Well, they are whispers no more.