News focus: Customer reviews are catching on - but where's the data?

Online reviews have been slow to catch on in legal services. While holidays and restaurants seemingly cannot be booked without a stranger on the internet validating your decision, the public have consistently preferred to choose lawyers through word of mouth or geographic familiarity.

But research conducted by regulators and published this week showed that indifference or even opposition to online exposure is ebbing.

There remains a long way to go. Just 44% of firms say they actively encourage existing clients to post reviews about them – most commonly directing them to Google Reviews, ReviewSolicitors or Trustpilot. Even among these converts, just two-thirds use consumer-generated content to attract new clients.

For the regulators, allowing access to online information to grow organically has not been an option since the Competition and Markets Authority concluded that too many consumers were clueless when choosing a lawyer. Hence why the Solicitors Regulation Authority, Council for Licensed Conveyancers, and CILEx Regulation ran a pilot scheme looking at how the sector could improve in this area. The subtext was that if lawyers do not engage with online reviews, a ‘mandatory’ sword of Damocles might hang over them.

Based on the pilot results, the SRA is reasonably pleased – but hardly overwhelmed – with the pace of change.

Barriers remain to the profession making information on services and performance more readily available. Public awareness is still relatively low and legal services are still deemed too complex for meaningful performance indicators.

SRA chief executive Paul Philip said: ‘Our pilot demonstrated that while progress is being made in this area, there is clearly still some way to go in both identifying the most useful indicators of quality and working more closely with those who can help share this data.’

According to the research, 22% of the public said they would refer to review websites about legal services, compared with 88% who used them for other services or products.

Among law firms, just half reported that they monitored online reviews. However firms in the pilot described seeing commercial benefits – including some of the smallest firms, which had increased contact from consumers as a direct result of online reviews. Some providers have already responded by building online reviews into their marketing. But challenges remain – for example, where reviews appear not to be written by clients. Consumers were also almost universally negative about price comparison sites for legal services, wary of firms engaged in a ‘race to the bottom’.

'The SRA’s pilot scheme provides the confirmation we’ve all been anticipating – reviews are no longer a choice; they’re a necessity'

Michael Hanney, ReviewSolicitors

The Law Society backs efforts to increase information on the quality of customer service and points out that the profession has worked hard to meet new transparency requirements in recent years.

But president Lubna Shuja said: ‘It remains difficult to develop meaningful benchmarks across a diverse range of practice areas which can provide a useful indicator of what quality service should look like across the whole sector.’

The grateful recipients of regulators’ drive for more online information are of course the review sites themselves, which signed up to a voluntary code of conduct to take part in the pilot. ReviewSolicitors reported a 66% growth in users visiting its platform in the last year and a 200% increase in numbers of law firms engaging with the website. Around 4,000 law firms have responded to at least one review on the site and most have taken control of their listing.

ReviewSolicitors chief executive Michael Hanney said: ‘The landscape of legal services is shifting. At the heart of this change is the undeniable importance of online reviews. The SRA’s pilot scheme provides the confirmation we’ve all been anticipating – reviews are no longer a choice; they’re a necessity.

‘While the SRA may not have yet unveiled their comprehensive action plan of specifically “how” they intend to compel law firms, they’ve decisively laid the groundwork for reviews to become an industry-wide requirement.’

Has progress been fast enough for the SRA to let the relationship between review sites and law firms grow without further intervention? Talk of mandatory use has gone quiet since the Legal Services Board floated the idea in 2020, but the principle has not gone away. The SRA pointedly said this week it would ‘explore opportunities and regulatory levers’ to improve accessibility and availability of legal ombudsman decisions. In other words, details of complaints may have to be posted on firms’ websites or even review sites.

The prospect of further action in addition is less certain, with the SRA pledging merely to ‘explore options’ to increase law firms’ engagement with online reviews. Watch this space, in other words.

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