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The Faculty of Advocates’ members practise in eleven main stables falling under Faculty Services Limited, the Faculty Service company. Stables fall into three broad categories: civil, criminal and mixed. The majority of stables are devolved from the Faculty, and have some important independent powers, including the right to choose members. Some devolved sets have pushed independence to build specialist groups and adopt the clerking and marketing methods common among the more progressive English chambers. The progressive approach has been enthusiastically endorsed by larger Scottish civil and commercial firms of solicitors: ‘With the type of client base we have, we need counsel who are as flexible and accessible as possible, and the new approach gives us that; the more traditional approach is frustrating, albeit that those who adopt it are thankfully becoming fewer in number’. However, some solicitors demand further improvement: ‘After a good start in refreshing the provision of advocacy services at the Scottish Bar, stables now need to invest in their business structure and facilities to put them fully on a par with of the most innovative sets in London’.

Elsewhere, concerns about public-funded work remain, particularly amongst advocates of recent call.

Solicitor-advocates continue to steadily gain ground; mixed doubles comprising a senior advocate and a junior solicitor-advocate, while not yet common, are proceeding without problems. The solicitor-advocates also received a fillip in January 2010, when the Scottish Government published the Thomson Review of Solicitor-Advocates, recommending a single code of conduct for solicitor-advocates and advocates.

Scottish advocates tend to have wider practices than their English counterparts, and inclusion in one category does not imply that the advocate mentioned is limited to that area of practice.

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