What are solicitors for? Do they have public confidence and trust or are they seen more cynically as a bunch of rogues ready to fleece clients?

Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, reminded an audience last night that even though the profession had moved on from Bleak House, there was still a view — as Dickens put it — that “the one great principle of English law is to make business for itself”.

It is not a view that Straw shares. A lawyer himself, he seems to like his once-fellow professionals or at least more so than did Lord Falconer of Thoroton, the former Cabinet minister-lawyer and his predecessor.

Delivering his first big speech on the future of the legal profession, Straw made much of the profession’s virtues. It would be idle, he said, to pretend that the legal profession was one where the rewards for some could not be great. He added though: “But the rewards for many, I know, are rather less than the parody of us [note the inclusive] implies.”

He went further. The profession was bound by certain values — “values that earn trust, protect the vulnerable, promote rights, provide a high standard of service and ensure access to justice for all”. These values had underpinned generations of lawyers and the exercise of their responsibilities to enrich and protect society.

High-sounding words and principles and ones that chime with a new campaign, or bout of navel-gazing, by the Law Society as to what solicitors’ core values should be. Straw was launching a series of eight events to be held around England and Wales — the first last night hosted by Clifford Chance, the City law firm, to look at justice and the rule of law, integrity, independence, best interests of the client, standards of service and public confidence.

It may seem rather philosophical. Solicitors on the ground are likely to be more interested in recent statistics from the society showing the increasingly elusive nature of partnership. It found that 38 per cent of private practice solicitors were partners last year, compared with 46 per cent a decade before and 66 per cent in 1987.

Those figures highlight another problem — the massive disparity between the partnership prospects of male and female solicitors. Half of men are partners, compared with 22 per cent of women: the differential has scarcely shifted in ten years. It was a problem that Straw, despite his bonding with the profession, was not slow to pick up on. If the public is to have confidence in the justice system it needs to see its own background reflected in the judiciary and key to achieving that was “high-quality lawyers from diverse backgrounds”.

It was encouraging that in the past ten years the number of women holding practising certificates had risen by 100 per cent, he said. But while women made up 60 per cent of admissions to the Law Society, only 23 per cent were partners in law firms. And those from a black ethnic minority background made up only 9 per cent of private practice solicitors.

He accepted that this was not just a problem for solicitors. At the Bar 30 per cent of practising barristers were female but women made up fewer than 10 per cent of Queen’s Counsel and only 4 per cent of QCs were from an ethnic minority background.

Diversity, of course, makes business sense. To be fair, the Law Society is well aware of it. It has launched a diversity charter to encourage FTSE 100 firms to monitor the ethnic composition of law firms tendering for contracts. Individual firms are starting to publish their diversity policies and data. Barclays Legal, when procuring legal services, asks firms with whom they work for their diversity policies — and if they don’t provide the data, they don’t get on the panel.

So principles aside, it comes back to money. Straw made much of the profession’s earning power — the legal sector’s turnover last year was £23.3 billion, more than double that in 1997. The UK’s exports of legal services grew to £2.6 billion in 2006. Law UK plc generates 1.5 per cent of the nation’s GDP. Diversity — both in principle and practice — goes hand in hand with success in business or increasingly will do.

So the Law Society debate is not all airy-fairy. With the impact of the Legal Services Act looming large, solicitors have to know where to position themselves, as indeed does the society under its new role of representative body, not regulator. One-stop shops, outside investment in and ownership of law firms, Tesco law . . . Andrew Holroyd, president of the society, says that the profession has entered a “seminal period”.

The trick — and the challenge — will be to keep the profession’s core values intact as it marches into the brave new business world and to ensure the rank-and-file solicitors who join it hang on in there. Ethics along with business, yes — but the young lawyers also want promotion prospects. Without those, the impact of the current navel-gazing will remain just where it has begun — among the chattering classes of the lawyers who have already made it.

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