The following statement was made to me by a solicitor: ‘Clients often do not fully understand what they are buying, hence any client review is meaningless.’ I take the opposite view...The following statement was made to me by a solicitor: ‘Clients often do not fully understand what they are buying, hence any client review is meaningless.’ I take the opposite view – it is because clients don’t know exactly what they’re buying that they rely on reviews from others.

A few observations to shape the discussion: people will ‘buy’ on reputation, but many law firms don’t seem to want to ‘sell’ themselves on that basis.

Is this part of that strange paradox where, collectively, solicitors seem sometimes not particularly highly ‘thought of’; but individually, between the client and the solicitor, the trust is absolute.

The bigger picture must be ‘how to leverage the role of the trusted adviser?’; to engage more regularly with clients and potential clients by providing services that clients would be happy to purchase from their legal advisers.

Competing on price makes no sense at all and client’s perceptions of value are certainly not just about the cost of legal advice.