The Firm: law but so much more

My firm's occasional brainstorming meeting was held this year in a restaurant on the outskirts of Wisbech, Cambridgeshire in a street that had seen the full force of demolition contractors wielding bulldozers and large weights on cranes. The restaurant stood there bravely and defiant, the only building left amid a sea of destruction. It was a scene reminiscent of the bleak landscape of a Mad Max movie.

Just as our partners settled down beneath an illuminated picture of a waterfall (the water once appeared to flow but now was still) in the aromatic ambience of the previous night's cuisine to contemplate our navels and our future, so the representatives of the G7 countries were at the same time considering the future of the world economy and were no doubt also contemplating their navels.

There were 18 of us, peering at each other in the unaccustomed early light of a Saturday morning. We were charged with first reflecting on where we are now, and then imagining where we might be in five years' time '“ even though next week is as far into the future as most of us care to peer at the moment.

In true cinematic style, the picture of the waterfall (and us with it) dissolves with that liquid wobbliness that denotes a shift in time.

Cradle-2-Grave Law

It is now 1 January 2013 and every bit of the Legal Services Act is now in force. The newly completed headquarters offices of Cradle-2-Grave Law and Allied Services Solutions (not very affectionately known to all as 'The Firm') have recently opened their doors to the public. It is a vast building, taking up the whole length of a street that, a few years earlier, had looked like a bomb site.

The diminutive chief executive officer Sir Ebeneezer Asbo (his knighthood awarded for services to alternative business structures) is proudly showing round a group of reporters. He waves expansively at the huge domed area that greets all visitors. High in the air are gold-encrusted paintings in the style of Michelangelo depicting great legal battles. The floor is laid in bianco carrara marble. At the centre is a carved statue of a naked figure that looks not unlike a past senior partner holding a bunch of grapes in one hand and the scales of justice in the other. Radiating out in every direction are the corridors that are the various arms of this giant enterprise.

From the first corridor is emitted a warm light and the gentle sound of a Mozart horn concerto. Those who venture down it find their footsteps deadened by soft white carpeting. Operatives bearing the distinctive logo of The Firm hasten back and forth. Trainees once had to have knowledge only of law, but nowadays, following the collapse of much of the NHS, many are also medically qualified. Every now and then, those with acute hearing might discern a very small high-pitched cry as yet another baby is brought into the world through The Firm's Maternity Solutions Division.

Sir Ebeneezer next takes the reporters to a more bustling part of the building. Quaintly designed to look like a Dickensian street, this department provides everything everyone ever wanted to move from one home to another '“ an estate agent, a furniture warehouse and a removal division.