Usually, parliamentary agents specialising in Private Bills will have been employed.

Costs of Parliamentary Agents and others.

Parliamentary Agents:

After investigation by Parliamentary agents Brown and Selden, however, the castle was slighted the following year, which rendered it impossible to defend.

He practised as a solicitor in Edinburgh 1840-45, after which he went to London and became head of the firm of Martin and Leslie, parliamentary agents.

Parliamentary Agents expanded into the space left by the clerk and formed the Society of Parliamentary Agents in 1840.

Parliamentary Agents are solicitors (and, hence, the firms they belong to) who are licensed by the Houses of Parliament to draft, promote or oppose Private Bills.

This was a source of political controversy, since Railway directors were becoming seen to be overly powerful, leading the Prime Minister at the time, William Ewart Gladstone, to identify Parliamentary Agents as 'the deeper power in opposition'.

Much of the work of Parliamentary Agents, as experts in the legislative process and Whitehall and Westminster political culture, would now come under the profession of political consultancy, although the remaining Parliamentary Agents are now billed as Law firms first and Parliamentary Agents second.