Lawyers are still unpopular ith the public. Derek Bedlow asks why - and whether inititives such as the Law societys new 'What Price Justice?' campaign could help.


Everyone has his favourite lawyer joke. But the public perception of lawyers is not generating much mirth in the profession itself. The image of lawyers as self-interested ‘fat cats’ on huge salaries has proved difficult to shift, while solicitors regularly appear below other professionals in surveys of the ‘most trusted’ professions, with frequent comments that they are aloof, arrogant and expensive.



Even though the first instincts of solicitors may be to say that the negative image does not matter that much, public attitudes towards lawyers are likely to prove important in the current battle for more legal aid funds. While the NHS – and the salaries of GPs and nurses – has seen considerable investment in recent years, it is often lamented that there are ‘no votes in legal aid’. The Law Society’s representation arm has taken steps to reverse this with a high-profile campaign launched last week, ‘What Price Justice?’ It will highlight the difference legal aid solicitors have made to individuals’ lives in a bid to win public support, and to put pressure on government.



It is not the first time Chancery Lane has mounted a campaign to improve the image of the profession. In 2004, it unveiled the campaign of ‘My hero, my solicitor’ to show to the public the circumstances where they could call on a lawyer for help. In 1991, it used superman-style character ‘Will Power’ to promote ‘Make a Will Week’, but he did not go down well with the profession itself. Back in 1977, ‘Mr Whatsisname’ was deployed to encourage people to get sound legal advice – but the campaign was sabotaged when a solicitor took the name by deed poll.



The closest analogy to the current effort is the ‘Justice Denied’ campaign launched by the Law Society to coincide with the passage of the Access to Justice Bill through Parliament in 1999. Featuring full-page advertisements in national and local newspapers, the £600,000 campaign drew on four case studies of ordinary people who, according to Chancery Lane, would be affected by the proposed withdrawal of legal aid from personal injury claims or by a reduction in the number of legal aid firms through contracting. At its heart was a bid to have guarantees that legal aid would be available to vulnerable groups enshrined in statute.



However, the government reacted badly to the claims, issuing a detailed rebuttal and the then Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine, branding it ‘irresponsible scaremongering’. More pertinently, it led to the insertion of section 43 in the Bill, which aimed to control the Society's use of practising certificate fees.



In any case, according to one of the widest surveys of public attitudes towards the profession– carried out by consumer group Which? – such advertising campaigns seem to have had little effect. Its most recent survey, published in November 2005, found that one in six consumers of legal services considered the service they had received to be poor. The main causes for complaint were unexpectedly high bills and the failure of many solicitors to listen to their opinions, while other common grievances included rudeness, arrogance and poor communication of the progress of cases. ‘It’s a real problem for the profession if so many people are saying these things,’ says Louise Restell, Which? project manager.



The position seems to have improved little since the Law Society conducted similar research in the mid-1990s, which found that many members of the public perceived solicitors to be ‘aloof, elitist, greedy, expensive and slow’. Countering this view is one of the key declared aims of Law Society President Fiona Woolf. ‘It’s time to turn the negative public perception of our profession around, so that we are no longer seen as fat cats but rather appreciated as trusted, valued – even indispensable – advisers,’ she told the Law Society’s annual conference last month (see [2006] Gazette, 5 October, 5).



It will not be easy. The relentlessly negative portrayal of lawyers in the media has been part of the reason why they are generally held in low regard. Nowhere is the negative image more prevalent than in the US, where legal marketing consultant Nader Anise has founded the American Lawyers Public Image Association to try and counteract this. But he says the growth of the Internet is making that task more difficult. Mr Anise explains: ‘Everyone has a pulpit, and it makes it look as if everyone hates lawyers.’



Many of the factors behind this state of affairs may be self-inflicted. One of the root causes is many people’s poor direct experience of using solicitors. As the Which? research demonstrates, if many solicitors cannot get the basics right, then they are unlikely to win public confidence when dealing with more complex matters. ‘If Tesco had one in six of its customers rating its service as poor, then it would be in big trouble. The legal profession needs to embed customer service into its culture,’ says Ms Restell.



In a less deferential age, clients expect greater transparency and demonstrable value for money from their advisers, and above all, to be treated as equal, something that not all solicitors seem to have realised. ‘From the qualitative research we have done, there’s still a parent-child relationship between many solicitors and their clients, which is in part perpetuated by the use of “legalese” in communication with clients,’ Ms Restell says. ‘Solicitors need to stop patronising their clients and explain the process in layman’s language.’



However, the efforts of firms to improve their service to clients are being undermined by low levels of morale in parts of the profession, says Maitland Kalton, senior partner of niche London technology firm Kaltons. He is also the founder of the campaign group Lawyers for Change, which aims to improve lawyers’ ethical standards and client service and to ‘humanise’ the practice of law. ‘The evidence is that 40% of lawyers are not happy with their career choice and that’s not only very sad, it’s very costly for law firms,’ he says. ‘The idea of excellence in client service is nonsense if you can’t please the lawyers themselves.’



More generally, a factor in declining levels of respect for lawyers has been the growing perception of lawyers as ‘ambulance chasers’, an impression bolstered in recent years by the high-profile advertising campaigns run by personal injury claims handlers, which are often wrongly labelled as solicitors by the public and media. Ironically, however, it was the Law Society that initiated the mass marketing of legal services to the public through its Accident Line scheme in 1994, and this rather underlines the fine line that individual solicitors and the Law Society as a whole have to tread when attempting to promote the interests of the profession to the public at large. Clearly, the profession needs to promote itself, but it runs the risk of appearing self-interested when it tries to make its voice heard.



For Sue Stapely, a solicitor and public relations expert at Quiller Consultants who has helped many a law firm out of a PR crisis, it is the way lawyers deal with complaints that most riles the public. It seems that for many solicitors, ‘sorry’ still seems to be the hardest word. Ms Stapely says: ‘The single biggest reason for the poor perception of the profession is the way that we handle complaints. We are crap at it – we get very defensive, and our instinct is often to deny that we are in the wrong and not to apologise, but the experience of other professions and the rest of the business world is that if complaints are handled well, you actually strengthen the relationship with a client rather than weaken it.’



The task of improving the image of the profession will be no quick fix, but it would appear that, for some sections of the profession in particular, failing to address some of these issues means the future could be bleak. The Legal Services Bill promises to liberalise the business and profit-sharing structures within which lawyers can work, potentially opening up more commoditised services such as conveyancing and personal injury in particular to competition from banks, supermarkets, estate agents and other commercial organisations, many of which can boast better records of client service and, crucially, brand names that many consumers trust.



The Which? research found that 67% of the public said it was a good idea for legal services to be available from supermarkets or banks and 63% said they would have no problem in using them, provided their advisers were sufficiently well-qualified. ‘People do trust certain brands and they do take their customer service very seriously,’ says Ms Restell. ‘If brands that people know and trust start offering legal services, it would bring about serious competition for the high street firms.’



If the public’s perception of the traditional way that the profession operates does not improve, then it may find that these companies make serious inroads into their businesses. And that really is no joking matter.



Derek Bedlow is a freelance journalist