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3 Int'l J. Legal Prof. 5 (1996)

handle is hein.journals/injlepro3 and id is 1 raw text is: INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE LEGAL PROFESSION, VOL. 3, NOS. 1/2, 1996 EDITORIAL CAROLE WILLIS* & ELENI SKORDAKIt *Research and Policy Planning Unit, The Law Society of England and Wales, and tLecturer in Law, School of Law, University of Westminster, London, UK The solicitors' profession has experienced a significant amount of change over the last 50 years. Its work and composition, as well as its size, have changed in ways difficult to imagine before the Second World War. The number of solicitors with practising certificates is now three and a half times that of 1952. Not only is the solicitors' profession much larger than it was after the war but it has been growing at an accelerating rate, for example, between the period 1952-1962, the number of practising certificate holders grew by 15%, while the percentage increase in the following decades was 35.1% for 1962-1972, and 57% for 1972-1982. Even taking into account the recession-hit nineties, the profession managed to grow by 42.7% in the decade 1982-1992. Furthermore, for solicitors in private practice, the distri- bution between sole practitioners, partners and assistant solicitors has changed considerably as a result of a dramatic increase in the proportion of assistant solicitors (Jenkins & Lewis, 1995). In addition, the fact that for the first time in 1993, the number of women admitted to the Roll of solicitors was higher than the number of men would strike many as unbelievable. Other developments would also be hard to contemplate 50 years ago, such as solicitors selling their services in a global market, setting up multi-national partnerships or opening offices as far afield as the Pacific rnm. The Law Society's long-term strategic plans (Law Society, 1991) stress the commitment of the Society to use research to help practices to evaluate trends in the requirements for legal services and to identify changes which will affect the solicitors' profession and its professional body. Thus it is appropriate that the Law Society should have encouraged its Research and Policy Planning Unit to develop as part of its Research Programme a project which looks at different aspects of social change and which plots the effects of these changes on the profession. It was further recognised that the Society could make an important contribution to the corpus of knowledge in this area by documenting these changes clearly. It was decided to deepen the context of the study by bringing together contributions from experts looking at various aspects of change, rather than by commissioning a single view. The topics covered by the papers which follow are diverse, as are the opinions Address for correspondence: Carole Willis, Research and Policy Planning Unit, The Law Society of England and Wales, 113 Chancery Lane, London WC2A 1PL. 0969-5958/96/01/20005-02 Q Journals Oxford Ltd 5

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