We all know where the Bar stands on referral fees – both the Bar Council and Bar Standards Board (BSB) strongly oppose their existence and have not been slow to express their views publicly. At last week’s meeting of the BSB’s full board, there seemed amazement that anyone could support them. Certainly the BSB’s response to the Legal Services Board’s consultation on referral fees has moved the rhetoric up a notch.

I’m not sure how the Law Society Gazette was hoping to reassure solicitors with its recent story “Consumers unattracted by non-legal brands”. The headline may sound promising, but as the statistics unfold it becomes quite clear this was not a good news story for the legal profession.

Before we all get too excited by the thought of law firms floating next year (and I’m as bad as the next hack – I would donate a non-essential organ in return for breaking the story of the first firm here to do it), it took Slater & Gordon seven years from starting to look at its options to reach the point of listing. That doesn’t mean every firm would take so long, but it does indicate how deeply firms need to examine it. Has anyone being doing that for nearly enough time to allow them to push the button in the next year?

We should have seen it coming, really. The last two property crashes and the wave of claims against conveyancers they brought in their wake broke the system for solicitors’ professional indemnity insurance – first the master policy and then the Solicitors Indemnity Fund – and so here we are again contemplating radical reform.

Martin Gregory of Legal Futures Associate Lateral Law argues that one response to commoditisation is for solicitors to offer different clients different levels of service at different prices.