With the Woolf reforms looming and the shake-up within the insurance industry continuing, Manchester's litigators face a testing time in 1999.
Manchester's importance as a hotbed of litigation – it is arguably the largest litigation centre outside London – is reflected in the large number of national insurance practices with substantial operations in the city.
These include local firm Beachcroft Wansbroughs (which merged with Vaudreys last year), Berrymans Lace Mawer, Dibb Lupton Alsop and Davies Arnold Cooper (DAC).
A number of the home-grown firms also boast high-quality litigation teams, including Halliwell Landau, James Chapman & Co, Davies Wallis Foyster and Elliotts.
Manchester also supports a large number of practices with a heavy plaintiff bias, such as Pannone & Partners, Thompsons, Russell Jones & Walker, Alexander Harris and Donns.
The upshot of this, according to Tony Brook, litigation partner at Berrymans Lace Mawer, is that Manchester "is a much more competitive market. Lots of firms want to get into insurance litigation in particular."
The build-up to the 26 April launch of the Woolf reforms will have a massive impact on the large number of litigators who trade in the city. But despite this, firms are treating the reforms as a marketing opportunity, rather than feeling a sense of impending doom.
As Andrew Gregory, managing partner of Davies Wallis Foyster, points out: "Litigation is a distress product which is difficult to sell to commercial clients, but for the first time the changes in practice and procedure offer law as an opportunity to actually sell a new product to all clients."
Brook adds: "Most people in business know what is coming. We are trying to educate clients as well as ourselves."
Privately though, many litigators are concerned about the ability of Manchester's court services to cope with the immense changes involved and question whether the necessary resources are in place.
"I think it's going to be rather stormy," says one of the city's most prominent litigators – an opinion shared by many.
As well as the upheaval Woolf will bring, the shake-up taking place in the insurance world is keeping Manchester firms on their toes.
The spate of mega-mergers in the industry (the most recent being that of the Commercial Union and General Accident last year to create the giant CGU), has had a knock-on effect on law firms.
In common with most of its competitors, CGU has decided to review its panels of law firms in a bid to make their outsourcing easier to manage and to cut costs.
The most demanding of clients in the legal arena, insurers are offering the survivors of the cull a greater amount of work. In return they expect heavy discounts, flexible ways of charging and performance to meet standard protocols. One of the biggest insurers is even believed to have asked its panel firms to consider the viability of 'no win no fee' arrangements.
Phil Jepson, who left Dibbs last year to become DAC's head of common law in Manchester, expects this trend to continue. "I anticipate that the big composites will continue to control costs closely," he says.
The demands of Woolf and the insurers, together with the millennium bug, have required the firms to invest heavily in IT and case management systems, which is painful at a time when pressure on fees has never been greater.
This in turn has led to pressures to merge, to provide greater resources. Berrymans' Brook, for one, is not prepared to rule out further mergers.
As well as being better-resourced, larger practices are often better able to withstand the problems presented if, for whatever reason, they are not selected by a particular insurer to be on its panel.
But despite all these challenges, the future is bright for Manchester's litigators.
With a strong emphasis on quality and with insurers looking for value, they are well placed to attract increasing amounts of work away from London.