A good job, well done

Small law firms could be shut out of the market and clients may end up paying more if regulators press ahead with moves to compel solicitors to appear on digital comparison sites. BAME solicitors, a disproportionate number of whom work in sole practices or small firms, could also be seriously disadvantaged.

So warned Law Society vice president Lubna Shuja, addressing the Society’s annual risk and compliance conference this year. She also pointed to the perils of malicious reviews and the difficulty of providing meaningful benchmarks across different practice areas.

With due deference to your VP, I can think of an equally compelling argument why solicitors ought not to be subject to yet more costly and onerous digital transparency measures. Newly published official data on client satisfaction indicates such an imposition is entirely unnecessary. I call in evidence a new survey published this week by quango the Legal Services Consumer Panel.

Now – to pinch from George Bernard Shaw – the panel is a body whose remit is to view the legal profession if not as a ‘conspiracy against the laity’, then certainly with a jaundiced eye. As far as the panel is concerned, solicitors are all out to charge as much they can, for as perfunctory and opaque a service as they can get away with.

I do the panel a disservice, perhaps. It would prefer to be regarded as a ‘critical friend’. And this week it has certainly been friendly. The body’s new tracker survey reveals that legal services clients feel they have more choice than ever before, are as satisfied as they have ever been, and increasingly think they have received value for money.

Satisfaction across all matters, including the complex, is around 80% or well above. As a layperson I find that remarkable. Engaging a solicitor is generally a forced or distress purchase. Who enjoys it? First-time buyers moving out of Britain’s fast-expanding stock of extortionately rented hovels into their own homes, perhaps. That’s about it.

Very good is never good enough, of course. If it were, quangocrats would become extinct. But as the Gazette revealed last year, the cost of appearing on some popular comparison sites used by solicitors runs to thousands of pounds a year. Before lumbering solicitors with yet more red tape, regulators would do well to properly assimilate the panel’s findings.