How could Co-op law affect you?

The launch of the Co-operative Group's family law service on 20 September has further confirmed the inevitable and sweeping change that alternative business structures (ABS) will effect on the legal services market and, in turn, high streets across the country. As many bakers, butchers and grocers saw their businesses fail to cope with the rise of supermarket chains, many high-street law firms will also struggle to compete with the Co-op's pledge to provide transparent, personalised legal services to the public on an affordable, fixed-fee basis - as opposed to the more widely-used method of hourly billing.

Many law firms will have to adapt if the Co-op's move into the legal market goes as expected - the group has already pledged to roll out legal services across its national network of 330 Co-op branded banks. The next logical step (although the group has not yet confirmed its intentions) will be to provide legal services from the 632 bank branches that it has purchased from Lloyds TSB, which are currently branded as ‘TSB' but due to be fully transferred to the Co-op - along with the corresponding Lloyds IT platform - in 2015. The long-term prospect of nearly 1,000 nationwide Co-op branches offering legal services will surely alter the market, as well as the way that high-street solicitors work.

In the coming years, the rise of ABS may lead to a large proportion of high-street solicitors being employed by a few large national companies, as these organisations' ability to sustain losses to increase market share makes competition increasingly difficult for small, private practices. The headhunting of Jenny Beck, who left the leading legal aid firm TV Edwards to head the Co-op's newly-established, 22-solicitor family law practice in London, is a clear indication that its policy will be to hire the best lawyers from private practices.

The rise of ABS may create long-term career opportunities for aspiring lawyers. Co-operative Legal Services (CLS) already employs approximately 450 staff at its Bristol office and has pledged to create 3,000 new legal roles, based mainly around five regional hubs. Around 90% of the new positions will be for lawyers, with 10% allocated to support staff. If, as seems likely, the Co-op introduces legal services to its 632 ex-Lloyds branches after 2015, it may have to employ a legal workforce of many more than 3,000 lawyers. For readers who don't wish to spend their careers on commercial City work at one of the big international firms, the career prospects at an ABS like the Co-op may prove enticing.

In 2011 CLS announced its intention to train many of its own lawyers by introducing an increasing number of in-house training contracts, thought to be around 100 when the 3,000 new legal jobs have been created. Plans were also announced for the creation of a CLS academy, which would provide intensive training and work placements to students on vocational courses, with a view to offering in-house training contracts to those who do well. With the SRA placing increasing emphasis on practical, work-based learning as an effective training method for novice lawyers and the forthcoming legal training review predicted to contain recommendations along the same lines, Co-op training contracts could prove very popular among aspiring lawyers in a few years.

Critics of the excitement and speculation surrounding Co-op's move into legal services will point out that there has been little recent noise regarding CLS's plans to introduce training contracts en masse, and none at all to confirm or deny predictions about its intentions for the 632 Lloyds branches post-2015. Yet it would seem prudent to suspect that the Co-op is merely choosing to keep its cards close at this early stage, as other potential rivals of similar or bigger size consider how to play their hands and claim a stake in the legal services industry.