The problem nowadays is that solicitors' firms increasingly insist on one of their own in-house advocates acting as junior counsel. Those lawyers may not be up to cross-examining witnesses in a rape or murder case. But Sir Anthony Hooper, a former appeal judge, put forward a radical solution in his speech to the bar conference. 

If the problem can be solved by adjourning the case for a few minutes, all that may be necessary is to order the side that was inadequately represented to pay for the delay. If not, he continued, the trial should be aborted and the party responsible should pay all the costs. "What the judge should not do," said Hooper, "is to continue the trial, leaving the remedy for defence incompetence to the Court of Appeal and leaving no judicial remedy for prosecution incompetence."

More broadly, barristers were told that they must adapt in order to survive. "Now is the time to change: not to change our values, or the quality of what we do, but to change from being reactive to what is going on around us . . . and to take charge of our future," said Michael Todd QC, chairman of the Bar Council. Much has been done already, with barristers increasingly accepting work directly from individuals and small businesses, cutting out the solicitor's traditional role as middleman. Barristers have never been allowed to hold clients' money-an essential part of many business deals-though a way round that restriction will soon be provided by an escrow account at Barclays Bank, to be called BarCo.

But surely the more that barristers take on the routine work previously done by solicitors, the more they will lose the elite status-championed at the conference by Lady Justice Rafferty-that sets them apart?