"stuart noble" >>>tell you quite a bit more about that from personal experience :)
This is well off topic but you did ask :)
The first solicitor I used (female) was a partner in a large firm. She was young, tall, very attractive, very intelligent, but hopeless (except possibly outside a nightclub, or out of bed)
Having complained to the company about wasting my time at £160/hour+VAT, I was assured the matter would be dealt with by a senior partner. So, the next one I got was another female, very intelligent also, but wasn't interested in giving a straight answer to a straight question.
Then I went to a smaller firm. The partner there spent a lot of time in the Court, was very direct and confident in her advice (which I liked) and drafted a separation agreement and consent order which were full of subtle drafting errors.
When the agreed two years was up and I moved on with the divorce process, the above sol was too busy to attend to it. (Did she discover her errors and wanted sleeping dogs to lie?)
So I went to another one, a partner in another large-ish firm. She was very arrogant, refused to answer questions and got very uptight when pressed on anything. I ditched her, and her firm (in both SFLA and STEP) refused to do any more work for me on a complicated will/trust... (wankers)
Then I decided to get a man. He was good, sharp, found the mistakes (my ex's sol was probably unaware of them but not any more, and all of them were to my ex's advantage, potentially costing me six or seven figures in the future - basically the errors would have allowed her to have spousal maintenance extended indefinitely), corrected them over a year's haggling, and I would recommend him very happily. His bill was fine too, about £1000. He used emails happily and didn't seem to charge for them.
The moral of this story is that the single best thing for a divorcing man is to avoid female solicitors - they are at best incompetent and at worst incompetent men haters. A few may be good but you can do Russian roulette only so many times...
Smart lawyers go mostly into commercial work. Family law attracts second grade brains and the females get too cynical to do a decent job. No wonder so many men get shafted.