Mr Mears lays down the law

Solicitors have elected a leader with radical views and an impossible task. Stephen Ward met him

He has been compared to Ross Perot, the outsider who takes on the system. But in the big contest Perot faded away, while Martin Mears has romped home to become President of the Law Society and leader of 64,000 solicitors in England and Wales.

He dismisses the comparison: Perot, he says, was an empty demagogue. Instead he seizes excitedly on a parallel with Margaret Thatcher in 1975: "She came from outside the circle, and challenged the existing culture of the grandees of the Tory party, who had alienated their supporters over the years."

Mr Mears is not from London, nor even Birmingham or Manchester, but from Great Yarmouth - a country solicitor come up to the big city. He wears the solicitor's uniform grey but for a beige linen jacket, which marks him as an outsider in the cavernous clubland atmosphere of the Law Society's Chancery Lane headquarters.

He comes equipped with an agenda for change but the jury is out on how strong his mandate is. Little more than a third of solicitors voted, but then they are not used to elections; the last time there was a contest for the post was in 1954. Of those who did return ballot papers, half backed the outsider and only a third the Law Society's own man. On the other hand, five solicitors out of six did not vote for him.

Those who did, however, may have been registering a protest - a cry for help, even. Mears believes he has tapped a rich seam of anti-authority discontent which spreads way beyond the closed professional world of solicitors. "The establishment in general is greatly disliked and distrusted, and this applies to the legal establishment also. There is this huge disillusionment with the Government and its natural supporters, and comparable disillusionment among the legal profession with its representatives."

His most popular election cry was his promise to axe bureaucracy. "The Law Society's expenditure has increased from around pounds 6m a year in 1984 to a budgeted pounds 51m a year in 1996. That is a huge expansion. Now you could justify it, possibly, if it were in the context of a booming profession. What we've seen is high-street firms enormously battered by the recession in the last six years, and simultaneously you've had this expansion in Chancery Lane. One doesn't go well with the other."

In short, if the society wants to keep its legitimacy as the voice of the profession, it needs to cut its cloth - just as high-street firms have had to do. Mears promises no redundancies, but a reduction of the 700 staff through natural wastage. "We need to enforce a new culture that says to the profession: 'We see your problems, we acknowledge them, and our way of acknowledging them is to set a good example.' "

This Thatcherite axe slashing through head office may cheer up solicitors who struggle to find thousands of pounds in compulsory annual fees to belong to their closed shop, and it may make them feel that the Law Society is less out of touch with their straitened circumstances. But it won't do much to tackle the real problems facing the profession: a sustained assault by government on its traditional position of privilege and a determination to enact far-reaching reform of the legal process.

Mears hopes to negotiate more robustly, to put the solicitors' case more effectively. But he may find the task of gaining public sympathy for lawyers harder than he currently believes.

Take this example: Mears's well-publicised disdain for the Law Society's attempts to encourage positive discrimination in the profession. The new president does not see a problem if few women, gays or blacks become top lawyers. He has, he says, seen no evidence of discrimination, and if he does he will act. But for the time being political correctness is "a small matter". That may be how the profession sees it, but to say so will not make solicitors popular.

And they could certainly do with some more public support. The Government has already taken away solicitors' monopoly on conveyancing, which used to be a nice little earner - often several hundred pounds for a few hours' routine work.

Legal aid rates have remained virtually frozen for three years - something which Mears has promised action on. What is the Law Society for if not to keep rates up with inflation?

And worse attacks are to come. Mears calls the proposed changes in a recent Green Paper from the Lord Chancellor a "nuclear bomb": legal aid work in future could be confined to a small percentage of law firms, perhaps only one in ten, who had legal aid franchises. No franchise, no legal aid work, and the fear is that small firms will be squeezed out.

Lawyers are a profession trying to come to terms with a new place in the world - rather like doctors, who have recently found themselves unappreciated, suspected of looking after themselves more than their patients. But is Mears likely to lead his colleagues forwards or backwards - indeed, is he more likely than his predecessors to take them anywhere at all? On the fundamentals it seems to be backwards, for his is the stance of a trade union leader protecting his closed shop. He is explicitly opposed to competition: "There is no conflict between solicitors' well-being and prosperity, and the public interest."

He summons an analogy with doctors: "If you call upon doctors to work 80-90 hours a week, inevitably the service they give to their patients is diminished, because they are tired and they make mistakes. So it is in the patients' interest that doctors should have a decent standard of living, and they should be able to earn that standard by performing adequately.

"It is not in the public interest to have lawyers who have burgeoning overdrafts, increased costs in their practice and reduced fees. They also will make mistakes and will not be able to afford quality staff, and that is not good for the client.

"The problem we have with consumer organisations is that they demand quality service, lawyers who do a quick job and don't make mistakes, and rock-bottom fees. You can't have both. Implicitly, it means the punter paying a higher fee, but for a better service."

Does Mears really think solicitors can get more taxpayers' money from the legal aid fund, given the pressure on the Lord Chancellor to reduce spending from its huge pounds 1.4bn annually?

He does, and this is how: he will cut abuses in legal aid by exposing them, thus helping to ensure that public money is wisely spent, and changing the image of solicitors from fat cats to white knights defending the poor.

"It's not my job to produce a profession of fat-cat lawyers. But in this profession we're talking about a majority of people whose income has fallen below a reasonable level. A recent survey showed 25 per cent of sole practitioners had a gross income of less than pounds 43,000 a year. Out of that they have to pay their secretary, their indemnity insurance and the general cost of managing their practice. It's easy to see they're left with an income of less than pounds 20,000. These are not fat cats."

He quotes a large legal aid firm in Liverpool which went out of business this year, leaving the partners personally liable for debts.

As with teachers before, and now both nurses and doctors, the solicitors' leader will have to walk a tightrope. He has to be popular with his members, and at the same time improve their standing with the public, so that the Government will feel less confident about attacking them. If he fails, he will be judged not as a Perot or a Thatcher, but as an Arthur Scargill.