This is going to be a tough year for family lawyers. For many, the recession has already affected their practices, with a decline in divorce figures and a reluctance on the part of clients to engage solicitors as fully as they did beforehand.

It is clear that concerns for clients, about the housing market, their ability to get mortgages or their job security, have made them more hesitant about embarking on major personal changes.

But there seems to be a more fundamental sea change taking place, one that is perhaps accelerated by the recession. Given the expense of legal services, there is little doubt that family lawyers are competing against the rise of the ‘DIY divorce’.

The internet has brought about a change of attitude towards the purchase of legal services. The expectation that information will be free has brought in to sharp focus precisely what clients are prepared to pay for, and what they are not.

Many family lawyers are experiencing a change in their type of retainer as a result – moving from being fully instructed, to being used much more on a consultancy basis. The attitude is very much: ‘I want to do as much as I can for myself, and only pay lawyers to do what they alone can do.’

Non-legal providers are cashing in on this. Wikivorce was set up in 2008, and has over 50,000 subscribers. It offers a number of fixed fees for divorce assembly kits and consent orders. DivorceOnline also offers commoditised divorce and separation agreements at a low cost.

Not only do these providers give substantial free information, in the case of Wikivorce there is also a substantial online community from which subscribers can benefit. Those who have been through divorce help those who are about to go through it, sharing their experience, which in turn is retained in a library of Questions and Answers.

In the coming months, a number of additional changes are going to reinforce these trends. The cutbacks to public funding have been deliberated at length in previous issues of The Gazette. The impact on how legal services are supplied cannot be underestimated.

Furthermore in October the Legal Services Act will come in to force, facilitating non-legal providers entering the legal market place. At the very time therefore when the Government is cutting publicly funded work, a platform is being created for non-legal suppliers to compete for that and other family law work.

The spectre of major commercial organisations competing against high street firms has been described by some commentators in apocalyptic terms, with some experts saying that as many as 35% of law firms will disappear.

The majority of these will be precisely the sort of high street firm that has traditionally done the bulk of family law work.

It is against this background that the Family Justice Review is preparing its report, which is expected later in the year. The terms of reference for this review panel were set up in February 2010 by the previous Government, but have been carried forward by the new Justice Minister Kenneth Clarke.

The panel has been exploring how the family justice system can deal with family law issues more effectively, and in particular how it can help families ‘reach easy simple and efficient agreements’ – which is likely to promote the use of mediation to resolve conflict. An interim report is expected this spring, following which there will be further public consultation before a final report with recommendations is produced later in the year.

Mediation is very much centre stage procedurally also. It had been widely expected that the new Family Procedure Rules would contain a similar requirement to that imposed in publicly funded cases since 1997 – to have a compulsory Mediation Information and Assessment Meeting.

Although the Family Procedure Rules have not actually imposed any actual requirement in private law cases, Part 3 of the new Rules does emphasise the need for courts to consider ADR solutions. But that may well not be the end of the story, as the Government is expected to take further steps to promote mediation vigorously.

Given the planned cuts to the court services within the public spending review, the drive towards mediation is clearly not just fuelled by concern about conflict in family law cases. Saving public funds is central to this drive away from litigation.

Family lawyers will therefore be buffeted by two more waves. They will be competing against non-lawyer mediators, whose cost base is much lower. At the same time, their traditional platform for litigation – the court system – is becoming increasingly overburdened and inefficient.

This carries the undoubted risk that family lawyers will be tarred with the same brush of inefficiency: when clients are subject to delays and adjournments, no doubt it will be their representatives who will have to share the blame, or at least have to deal with the dissatisfaction.

All in all, it is the perfect storm, and the coming year is likely to see it reaching its peak.

So how should family lawyers react to these changes? It is tempting to batten down the hatches, and hope that the traditional service of the family lawyer will survive.

Certainly clients will still need representation in court, and the expertise that the family lawyer has will still be required. However, in an increasingly competitive market, there is likely to be a contracting amount of work for solicitors.

Other commentators are encouraging the family lawyer to take a bolder stance, and to meet these challenges head on. Central to this is an understanding of what clients are prepared to pay for. If there is a preference to do work for themselves, or to use mediation, then how can the traditional service be adapted?

Certainly, the rise of ADR – both mediation and collaborative law – appear to be upper most on the agenda both of client and Government. Instead of clients having to adapt and pay handsomely for a ‘one size fits all’ court system, the emphasis of ADR is to adapt the service for the individual client and his or her family.

The majority of clients still see a solicitor in the first instance. If clients are directed to other professionals – perhaps to child experts to help with parenting, or to family consultants to help with emotional fall out – the standing of the lawyer is enhanced rather than undermined.

The solicitor is seen as finding the best solution to the client’s problem, and doing so in the most cost effective way.

This process – of parcelling up different aspects of the traditional legal role and ‘sub-contracting’ them to other professionals – is sometimes referred to as ‘unbundling’, and is one of the chief characteristics of the collaborative law model. Actively promoting this is certainly one way of reassuring clients that the traditional solicitor has their best interests at heart.

It will encourage clients to use that solicitor for the more technical legal areas, where the legal expertise is most cost effective.

The legal profession has also been slow to use new technology to reduce costs and make the process more efficient. Some help is now at hand with the launch last month of CFEB’s new ‘divorce calculator’, which forms part of the money made clear website.

The calculator enables clients to fill in information about their finances – and those of their partner if they know those details – and work out whether they can balance the household budgets after separation.

They can also complete the capital schedules and the calculator enables them – or their solicitors or mediators – to adjust the distribution of those assets; in this way different possible outcomes can be looked at, to see which is most practical in meeting a family’s needs.

Most importantly, at each stage, the information can be sent by email to the advisors, so making more efficient the financial disclosure process.

No doubt other efficiencies will be delivered by technology. The challenge for the family lawyer is adapting to the new environment, and changing tack to meet the new demands of the client.

Roger Bamber is head of family law at Mills & Reeve