Law Society president Linda Lee pointed out in President’s Podium that the critical importance of legal ethics must not be sidelined as the market changes – opening up to greater competition with the licensing of Alternative Business Structures by the SRA from 6 October this year.

Lee argues that treated seriously, a lawyer’s ethics are an important differentiator for professionals concerned about greater competition, and serve the public interest.

At this point in time, it is interesting to reflect on the history of the complex relationship between government, the regulation of solicitors, and arguments as to who, in that relationship, does more to police the public interest.

At the start of the 19th Century, the inability of individual solicitors to regulate their own affairs, and the absence of a nationally authorised body of lawyers supported by a Royal Charter, pointed to a notable gap in English commercial markets.

The Society was granted its first royal charter in 1831 and from 1832 its offices were located in Chancery Lane, London, where they remain to this day.

A second royal charter in 1845 ceded enhanced powers to the Society and it became recognised as a private and independent body serving the interests of solicitors.

As a profession, it was not alone.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, new types of professional associations came into being, gaining chartered status, such as the Royal Society and the General Medical Council.

Often, the threat to professions was posed less by the government itself, as in modern times, and more by the encroachment of the landed aristocracy imposing their will on the growing middle classes, of whom solicitors, of course, were a part.

A thriving economy inspired many professionals to seek institutional protection and this was effected by the introduction of professional bodies to act as pressure groups in the growing medley of national and international trade.

The foundation of the Law Society, prior to its royal charter in 1825, triggered a sequence of historical landmarks bearing on governance and discipline that has given the Society a unique position in the British constitution.

From the 1850s, the Society tended to function very much as a trade union, yet solicitors’ increasing activity in public policy gave the body a special relationship with government.

Through this relationship, the Society managed to persuade politicians that legal matters were best left to the devices of lawyers.

Still, checks and balances were also imposed by the State, and governments were reluctant to allow solicitors a political blank cheque to do as they saw fit, irrespective of external influence and control.

Despite historically involving itself in somewhat murky pecuniary concerns, the judiciary, the government’s law officers and the management of the Society shared common ground in respect of what they considered to be the role of ‘elite lawyers’.

The Society complimented the government’s approach to legal reform, and offered a unique insight into law and politics, while at the same time succeeding to preserve the independence of the judiciary and promoting the view that solicitors should be allowed the freedom to put their own house in order.

Governments, where the professions were, arguably, over-represented, therefore realised that in policy-making, established professional bodies could make a very meaningful contribution.

That contribution to the public interest also became increasingly recognised in terms of the provision of services to poorer members of society.

In 1914 the government introduced a measure of support to low-income clients, but by 1922 the scheme ran into difficulties as the demand to seek divorces became greater than the number of solicitors able to take on new cases.

The juxtaposition of state intervention and professional autonomy continued and the Lord Chancellor requested the Law Society to assist by finding volunteers from the profession to shore up the struggling scheme; the Society’s Council accordingly lent support and agreed to assist.

Until 1945, there was no official legal aid, and special allowances to the poor to have access to the courts depended on lawyers acting out of charity.

Backed since the outbreak of war in 1939 by its Secretary General, Thomas George ‘Tommy’ Land (1906-1981), the Law Society supported this policy as it upheld the notion that professions transcended market forces and the state.

In 1989 Lord Chancellor Mackay introduced plans to break the professional monopolies of lawyers and to fuel Margaret Thatcher’s ethos of competition into the legal profession.

His proposals eventually led to a number of reforms, including the introduction of a new Legal Services Ombudsman.

The Legal Services Act 2007 is a further step in the same direction.

This introduction of greater competition in to the legal market coincides with major cuts to the legal aid budget that may leave many members of the public reliant on pro bono advice from lawyers and charities.

Lawyers will also have prominent involvement in challenging cuts made by national and local government to services for vulnerable people.

As has happened in the past, for both government and lawyers, the regulatory accommodation they reach with one another will in large part be determined by which of the two can be seen as the best protector of the public interest.

In the current case, will it be government for improving consumer choice and making a claim that consumer ‘protection’ has been improved, or lawyers for advising vulnerable clients and making some provision where the state has failed?

If it is to be the latter, the legal profession needs its ethics to play a prominent role.

Dr Richard Willis is a historian and published author