Editor's blog | Lawyer eat lawyer

Personal injury lawyers started reviewing their involvement in the sector within days of Lord Justice Jackson first unveiling his plans to curb the cost of litigation four years ago. Now mostly in place, the Jackson reforms, combined with the emergence of alternative business structures, are jeopardising the survival of countless traditional high street practices unprepared for the new environment. But the threat is not coming from supermarkets, as originally feared, or claims management companies. The predators with their eyes on the legal services market are other, larger law firms, with strong financial backing and commercial structures tuned to sustain thinner margins.

As smaller firms look for exit strategies out of the personal injury market, the field is opening up for these bigger players. So far the charge has been led most visibly by Australia's Slater & Gordon. The stock exchange listed firm has made no secret of its ambition to become a major operator in the UK legal services sector, saying in a presentation to investors that there was no "dominant law firm brand" in the UK. Having entered the UK with a bang in February last year with the acquisition of Russell Jones and Walker, Slater announced this week a three-way acquisition and said there could be more in the pipeline. It has also been buying up files from small independent practices.

But Slater is not the only firm in the race to wrestle control of the personal injury market. Defendant insurance firm Plexus Law, part of the Parabis group, has just acquired another defendant insurance firm, Greenwoods. Already the group is positioning itself as a key interlocutor to the insurance sector by offering a range of services, legal advice being only one of them. Retreating onto high value work such as clinical negligence will work for some firms - although possibly only in the medium term for most - but there is a bigger danger lurking: beyond personal injury, it is the wider high street portfolio that the big legal brands are targeting. Take Irwin Mitchell for instance, which, through six separate ABSs, is preparing a concerted assault on areas that have been the preserve of specialist high street firms, such as estate administration and Court of Protection work.

QualitySolicitors provided an interesting early response to these threats when it launched in 2009. Four years on and millions of pounds' worth of investment later, it is not clear whether its shared services model is as convincing a proposition as it first appeared. Like supermarkets diverting business away from high street shops, the big legal brands developed by lawyers - and the Co-op should be included in this - could siphon clients away from high street firms. Like artisan shops, smaller firms will have to be more astute about the service they deliver. Between large private client firms trading on customised, high value advice to high-net-worth individuals and the emerging national brands at the more cheap-and-cheerful end, independent firms must do more than just bang on about quality of service. It doesn't mean that the law is no longer a profession, just that the requirement to run a law firm as a business is now becoming an economic reality.