While other professions and enterprises are adopting terminology designed to elevate those who use their services, why is it that we are docilely using terms which demean our clients, our profession and the services we provide?

In a patronising attempt to make people feel important, the NHS calls patients ‘service users’, while rail passengers are now ‘customers’. Despite the threat to some aspects of high street legal practice from so-called ‘Tesco law’, our profession is adopting the jargon of such organisations and blurring important distinctions between us and them.

It is worth concatenating the now almost mandatory ‘deliver’ with the increasingly common ‘customer’ or, worse still, ‘consumer’. This implies, as the next link, ‘product’, perhaps manufactured by an ‘industry’ (qv Jack Straw). What happened to the profession that used to provide clients with a good service?

None of the above is meant to question the universally accepted need for us to adapt to the times, use IT efficiently, be clear and open about fees (‘transparent’) and not hide behind legal jargon. However, if we adopt the terminology of the looming competition, we unwittingly assume its philosophy and lay ourselves open to having to deal with that competition on its own terms and in an unequal contest. Do we really want to ‘pile ‘em high’ and offer BOGOFs? The more we parrot the words and cliches associated with big business, the more likely it becomes that some clients will develop unrealistic expectations of us while taking a skilled service for granted.

We should be doing more to promote our strengths, reflecting change as appropriate, and be using the correct words to convey the desired message and image. There are many aspects of what we do that cannot be commoditised, and for most people there is no substitute for face-to-face dealings. We are allowing ourselves to be brainwashed into believing that most clients want cut-price, 24-hour, online interaction. Yet such a facility could not, for example: conduct a sympathetic family meeting following a death; make a home visit for will instructions; tune into a family’s dynamics; or make a site visit on a non-routine purchase.

To revert to ‘consumers’, it occurred to me that a company such as Fortnum & Mason would flinch at being associated with such a term. It was therefore no surprise to see from that company’s website that it targets ‘connoisseurs’ with whom it then deals as ‘clients’.

Perhaps if we were to emulate the right kind of food supplier we would be facing the future with more confidence. We would be able to demonstrate the fallacy of any notion that providing a proper legal service is cheap and easy. In fact, such a course of action is ‘key’.

Mike Kelly, Thornes, Wolverhampton