What a relief to read Michael Moore’s recent letter in the Gazette (‘Don’t tie our hands’) as I had begun to think that I was the only solicitor left who didn’t regard the paying of referral fees as akin to some kind of criminal activity.
I agreed with every word of his letter. All our professional preserves are indeed being chipped away while the Law Society does little but increase regulation and red tape, and overheads soar accordingly. I specialise in private client work and have for some time been trying to obtain work from a local IFA. When I visited clients of his with him recently at their home one evening to take instructions for wills/LPAs, he made the point that by giving the job to me he was losing about £800 of commission that would have been paid to him by the non-solicitor firm (owned by another IFA) to which he generally introduces that kind of work. How can I compete with that? The IFA acknowledged that I provide a better quality and more personal service to his clients than the other firm but it simply does not make commercial sense for him to use me regularly. I would point out that my total fee was as much as the commission he would have received!
Mr Moore’s letter was in stark contrast to the usual, utterly depressing letter from Mr Townsend, chief executive of the SRA, about the ‘culpable failure’ of solicitors which appeared on the same page of the Gazette. We are now massively over-regulated (it is probably one of the few growth areas in the profession) and the SRA/LCS seem to start from the premise that all solicitors are basically dishonest, untrustworthy and greedy.
My firm was involved with handling miners’ claims so, yes, I do have an axe to grind. We had to pay back about £150,000 to miners about two years ago but we’re still here – just – although jobs have been lost. This was not, you understand, money that had gone into the pockets of the partners but fees paid to a claims-handling firm.
Was this the great scandal that has besmirched the good name of the solicitor profession? I don’t think so. The claims were dealt with competently and efficiently by my firm. The average repayment (excluding interest) was £276 and in more than 80% of cases amounted to less than £100 – hardly an extortionate amount, one might think, by way of remuneration to the firm that made the miner aware that he had a potential claim and which introduced him to a firm that had the expertise and experience required to deal properly with it.
I understand that there were firms charging excessive success fees. If so, they should have been dealt with firmly and quickly, yet five years after my firm was investigated they have not been (with one high-profile exception) and as far as I am aware, not a single penny of those fees has been repaid to miners. All I know is that we did not charge one penny of additional costs to any miner, but that did not stop the SRA acting in the most bullying and threatening manner to all the partners in my firm throughout the investigation while the Law Society in its representative capacity was nowhere to be seen.
If the Law Society felt so strongly about the matter at the time (rather than after the horse had bolted) then why did it not run a joint TV advertising campaign with the government telling miners to go and see their local solicitor for free – great PR. The facts of the matter are that a small number of complainants stirred up a few politicians (quite possibly the same politicians who saw nothing wrong with lining their own pockets with excessive expenses claims), the media jumped on the bandwagon and the Law Society, desperate to retain its in-house regulatory role, decided in its wisdom that it had to act tough and, more importantly, to be seen to act tough.
My small firm was an easy target but the fact that, as we approach the end of 2009, very few other firms appear to have been dealt with is incredible and the whole saga is, in my view, turning into a PR disaster for the Law Society and the profession in general. The overwhelming impression that has been given to the public is that fat-cat lawyers were lining their pockets at the expense of sick miners which, to put the record straight, was most definitely not the case with Gabb & Co.
We recently had an SRA inspection. The subsequent report was a dreary 12-page catalogue of ‘breaches of the Code’ and lack of ‘policies and procedures’. A self-righteous, negative and critical tone pervaded. There was not one positive comment. It is a classic illustration of the utterly depressing culture of the SRA. The inspector got most agitated about client care letters. I make the following observations:-
- As a solicitor I should be left to judge when a client care letter should be sent or not – it should not be mandatory. If I don’t send one and the client subsequently complains the onus is then firmly on me to resolve the problem with the client because I know that, if the matter is referred to the LCS, I am on a hiding to nothing.
- Most clients do not read them. Just ask yourself what you do with your bank’s or insurance company’s terms and conditions. A good example of the sort of madness I am talking about arrived in my post this very morning. I am a trustee of a family settlement which is purchasing a residential property. I received a 13-page letter from the local solicitor dealing with the purchase, setting out his terms of engagement, a Schedule of the work to be undertaken, dealing with money-laundering compliance and so on. The same letter presumably went to the other three trustees so it has taken 52 pages just to get a straightforward conveyancing job up and running.As a trustee, I am of course obliged to read all this stuff. Should I charge for that? If I do not like some of the terms and conditions do I write a five-page letter to my co-trustees setting out my concerns? If so, we can probably get the bill up to several hundred pounds before the job even starts. And who is paying for all this nonsense, Mr Townsend? The public, that’s who.
- For whose benefit are they anyway? I make the last point because I have recently been involved with an estate which a solicitor (acting as executor) had made a complete mess of dealing with. It has taken six years to get him to agree to a (miserly) reduction in his fees which totalled more than £30,000 + VAT. He and the firm of lawyers that he instructed to act for him (and apparently also the LCS which declined to intervene) took the view that, because he charged in accordance with his client care letter, the fact that he failed to deliver an adequate professional service was quite irrelevant. As you can imagine it was quite difficult to explain this to my clients. The moral seems to be that, so as long as the paperwork is tickety-boo why worry about the quality of the advice? Inevitably, of course, in the long run this will lead to de-skilling and more complaints.
It seems to me that we are now (and have been for some time) at the tick-box stage of regulation where issues such as whether we have an equality and diversity policy or have carried out a file review are as important (if not more important) than the quality of the service we offer. One simple reason for this of course is that people who are not solicitors and who have never done (and could not do) our job can judge the first but not the second.
So, Mr Townsend, why don’t you and your merry band stop preaching and start listening to solicitors in practice, especially in firms that have been around for a while and therefore one might reasonably assume have some idea of what the public do want. It’s quite simple – they want their legal affairs to be handled courteously and competently by someone whose judgement they trust and respect and who is prepared to put his (or her) hand up if something goes wrong and not hide behind rafts of paperwork. I seem to recall a lot of politicians claiming recently to have been acting ‘within the rules’ and look at what the public thinks of them.
My guess is that, rather in the way that people now lament the demise of their local bank manager, who knew everyone and could make decisions based on his own judgment, the public will soon be wondering what happened to their local solicitor and will be the poorer for it. My firm has been providing legal services to the public for 250 years but I suspect that the next 5-10 years will prove the most testing yet.
I was proud to be admitted as a solicitor nearly 20 years ago but, unless there is a sea change in the attitude of the Law Society and its regulatory bodies towards the very people they are supposed to be serving, I, like Mr Moore, will not be encouraging my children (or anyone else) to enter the profession. My fear is that things will only continue to get worse. Indeed, I judge (sadly) that it will not now be long before I can do my job (which I still love despite the best efforts of Mr Townsend and his ilk) more efficiently and cheaper (and certainly more enjoyably) without calling myself a solicitor. I am starting to look forward to that day, and in the words of the late great John Lee Hooker, ‘once I’m gone I won’t be back no more’.
Steve Meredith, Gabb & Co, Abergavenny
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