It may be difficult for many consumer-advising solicitors to imagine a service much more hostile to, and biased against, solicitors than that offered by the unqualified advisers at the Legal Complaints Service, forwhom ‘service-related complaint’ often appears to translate to ‘opportunity for solicitors to open their chequebooks, regardless of the merits’.

Something worse still may be precisely what is in store following the so-called ‘pragmatic’ or ‘non-legal’ – or ‘whatever we feel like, whatever the law or reality of the situation’ – approach envisioned by the new LegalOmbudsman Service (LOS).

It is a measure of how the legal profession is regarded that solicitors are having imposed on them a similar binding ombudsman scheme to that of financial advisers following mis-selling scandals.

The LOS’ recent Gazette advertisement made clear that they envisage judicial review to be the only real sanction against their powers. Unlawful decisionsof the LCS have been quashed in the Administrative Court, but that option is neither cheap nor swift in any sense, whether or not LOS decisions prove to be as illogical or incorrect as apparently many of their counterparts infinancial services often are.

Do we have to price into each piece of work the £400 case fee (watch how fast the two complaints exception disappears once the scheme starts), it now being a familiar topic of conversation in pubs that there is ‘free money’ to be easily had by complaining about your solicitor?

Another triumph of self-destructive force for what remains of the consumer-facing legal profession.

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