Without a franchise, we would be unable to deal with legal aid clients and getting one looked on the face of it a bit daunting. But we were all up for the challenge: forms had to be filled in and that’s what lawyers do best.

Tasked with doing this work at my firm, I began to have a close acquaintanceship with concepts such as appraisal, supervision, business plans and all kinds of new stuff about marketing which, until then, I had thought was something lawyers never did.

In a sense, it was a brave new world and, in truth, all a little exciting.

We obtained our franchises but, having obtained them, we started to be audited upon them. At first, rather gentle audits. Then they became fiercer, then hostile, and then downright manic.

One of the earlier auditors said that we should be aware that things would be getting a lot tougher. There were too many firms doing legal aid and this was part of the plan to reduce numbers. Curiously, however, numbers of firms doing legal aid started to increase.

So the next step was contracting. More hoops to jump through. More forms to fill in. That did not do the trick, so the novel idea of tendering was flung at us.

Having been successful in the bid for a tender, the whole process of audits started up again. Money was taken off bills already paid. Sanctions were applied.

Bureaucrats from the Legal Aid Agency wandered around our office, seeking to clawback as much money as they could, despite the fact that our bills were horribly low in the first place. I can recall a particularly heated debate about whether our bill which had been lodged for £224 in respect of a divorce should have been £160.

Colleagues in private practice who do no legal aid work react with horror when they hear about the levels of unremunerated work that we do, and how, having done the work for a pittance, some of it can then be disallowed.

It’s tough stuff being a legal aid lawyer. We are a bit of a forgotten breed, hated by the government, despised by the popular press, and paid less than your average plumber.

But we are all on the side of the angels. Whether we are protecting a battered wife by obtaining a domestic violence injunction, getting a homeless person a flat to live in, or securing asylum for a victim of torture, we are all making a difference. And that matters more than anything else.

This is my last column. I will still be filling out the LAA forms (online now), fighting my corner against audits and appeals. But I will also continue to make a difference for those that matter: clients who can’t afford lawyers but desperately need one.