The Law Society is building upon last year’s £450,000 advertising and public relations programme with a new campaign to promote the brand of solicitor to the public.

Last year’s campaign, which ran from early May to late June 2008, carried the strapline ‘Your solicitor, qualified to answer’ and placed advertisements in national newspapers and on taxis and billboards. It was supported by free promotional materials and by information on the Society’s website.

Before the start, solicitors ranked fifth in the public estimation of most trusted professionals, in a list headed by doctors and police officers. By the campaign’s end, they had overtaken bank managers to take fourth place, just two percentage points behind vicars and priests.

Stephen Ward, the Law Society’s director of communications, said: ‘This year’s campaign is planned for the autumn and will involve working closely with local law societies as well as law firms. We will again be focusing on value for money and reliability, in particular when compared with unregulated providers of legal services.’

He said his team’s ‘ongoing’ public relations work had generated 1,512 column centimetres of newspaper coverage for the work of solicitors in the first quarter of this year.