If you wanted to buy a bunch of bananas, you would not visit your lawyer. Likewise, if you wanted legal advice you would not go to your local corner store or supermarket. But that may change if plans to deregulate the UK legal market go ahead allowing supermarkets such as Tesco and Asda to add legal advice alongside services such as banking and insurance.

High Street solicitors are outraged at the prospect of incursions into their work. This was keenly felt recently when Tesco, the biggest of the supermarket giants, introduced a one-stop property service. On its website, it took a swipe at traditional conveyancing lawyers: “Solicitors can be slow to respond and won't necessarily rate your property sale as their highest priority. Because licensed conveyancers do nothing but conveyancing they have been able to streamline the whole process, which may give you a better service.”

Such slights will have little impact on big commercial law firms, which probably have not handled a domestic conveyancing transaction in years. But High Street firms up and down the country are already finding it hard to make ends meet. Smaller firms are closing or merging. Like grocers, chemists and hardware shopkeepers, who have all succumbed to the predatory activities of national chain stores, solicitors’ firms are under threat as they have never been before.

The erosion of legal aid, the intrusion of claims farmers and the legal expenses insurance market – which hives off many claims to mass producers of litigation in remote locations – has already made survival difficult for those who try to present themselves as legal general practitioners. Partners at many firms are already gloomy about the future.

The move to open up legal services will only squeeze us even more. Sir David Clementi, in a wide-ranging review of legal services that formed the basis of the Legal Services Bill, which is currently working its way through Parliament, recommended moving away from legal practices being exclusively owned and run by the partners in the firm and favoured instead the establishment of "Alternative Business Structures". This would open up the market so that supermarkets or other corporations can own a legal practice for the first time.

Solicitors are still largely constrained by the straitjacket of regulations that have changed little in years. Supermarkets (and they are only an example – the likes of Co-Op and the AA have also announced their interest in providing legal services) are free to use their financial muscle to cherry pick and market what they perceive as the most profitable services. Competition it may be, but on a steeply sloping playing field.

Solicitors are not the most popular creatures, but for generations they have formed part of the local scene in our towns and cities. They are accessible, local and play a vital part in regulating daily life, ensuring that access to the law (whether by making a will or resolving a consumer or neighbour dispute) is available at a local and personal level. If High Street solicitors disappear, the loss of yet another part of the local infrastructure will further reduce the amenity and value of local communities.

Large supermarket chains, on the other hand, are ruthless money-making machines whose activities are entirely profit-driven. If they want something, they will get it, and woe betide anyone who gets in their way. So what can we do? How do scattered law firms fight back?

First of all, here’s what not to do. Let’s not waste any more breath on shouting at Tesco or other supermarkets who are aiming to get in on the legal market. A weekend of advertising by a national supermarket chain boasting about its low prices would be more than the budget that the Law Society could put up in five years. Besides, who cares? Members of the public do not understand the subtleties of the difference between solicitors and licensed conveyancers. Still less do they care that a few solicitors are outraged. They will simply conclude that it is all out of self-interest.

But what we can do, which supermarkets cannot, is win on service. Successful high street solicitors prosper because they show that they care. They make their clients feel special – so special that they come back again and again, not because the produce is less expensive, but because they feel cared for and supported.

Traditionally solicitors’ firms do not work well with each other. A client gained by one is a client lost to another. But now we have a common enemy that, so far as the rural legal profession is concerned, really does hold weapons of mass-destruction.

Here's how we can win:

* Showing that we care about the communities we work in.

* Espousing all that is good in modern technology. Well used, IT can help enormously to speed up processes and improve efficiency as well as providing clients with easy access to our services.

* Stop being precious about business management. Some solicitors still curl their lips when it is suggested they are running businesses. We can still operate to the highest standards and at the same time run our firms on modern management principles.

* Being fast.

* Being reasonably-priced.

* Dealing personally and well with all legal problems and providing a service that is geared to the needs of the local community.

* Not trying to sell carrots.

Despite various exhortations beginning with Shakespeare to “kill all the lawyers”, we do a useful job and should not be ashamed of what we do or of telling others how well we do it. We may not be able to compete with the scale and financial muscles of supermarkets but what we can do is say to Tesco and anyone else who attempts to enter the legal market that we will beat them on quality of service every time.

If we are not yet geared up to do so, we had better do it now, because no supermarket will be exercising attractive options to buy us out.

The author is a partner in Dawbarns Pearson solicitors in King’s Lynn, Norfolk

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