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.

When then shadow justice minister Henry Bellingham last year floated the idea that some client account interest ­should be applied to the legal aid fund rather than solicitors’ pockets, some thought it one of the barmier suggestions of ways to supplement public funding. But even though Mr Bellingham has moved on, the idea has not, as proved by this week’s legal aid green paper.

An intervention into a solicitors’ practice is a drastic step and one which invariably results in the closure of the practice and often in the bankruptcy of the solicitor who is intervened in. It is because of this that pressure from the Law Society and others has been placed on the SRA and it now appears to have started considering alternatives to intervention wherever possible.