Dealing successfully with succession is proving a difficult challenge for many traditional legal practices. The average age of (predominantly male) equity partners is now 59, yet most have failed to plan for their exit and succession. As a result, many firms now face an uncertain future with little or no value being placed on the sale prices of their practices and no younger partners prepared to invest in equity to enable partners’ retirement.

It would be easy, if lazy, journalism to accuse the Solicitors Regulation Authority of some kind of u-turn in the way it has changed its approach to professional indemnity insurance reform. Bodies like the SRA sometimes cannot win – either they plough on and face charges of not listening, or they listen and are then accused of u-turns. Or perhaps of woolly thinking in the first place.

Charles Plant, the chairman of the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA), has finally said the unsayable and brought into focus what could well be the long-term future of regulation for lawyers – a single regulator for all, rather than the multiplicity we currently have.

So, is QualitySolicitors’ deal with WHSmith the “game changer” that chief executive Craig Holt claims it is? You have to say, very possibly. It is everything the evangelists of change bang on about – bringing legal services to the consumer, rather than the other way around.

For those firms that have decided they need to do something to meet head on the challenges of alternative business structures and the rest, but are a bit hazy on exactly what that something should be, there are no shortage of options.