So, Legal Choices eh? You know, Legal Choices! What do you mean you’ve never heard of it?

For the uninitiated, Legal Choices is a ‘consumer-facing’ website set up by the legal regulators to help people understand their options when choosing a legal adviser.

A laudable aim, but Obiter suspects a little more work is needed to get the message through.

A freedom of information request to the Solicitors Regulation Authority has revealed that in the two full years since its creation, the site has received 32,628 unique users – roughly the capacity of Leicester City’s home ground.

Over the same period, the regulator has put in £14,000 to maintain and run the site. Which equates to roughly 43p for every visitor.

It is not too difficult to see why punters have not been flocking to the site: since the turn of the year, just two articles have been uploaded to the ‘news’ section, on dating fraud and ‘divorce day’. Indeed, just 13 news articles appeared in the whole of 2015.

The site’s polls section – surely key to a consumer-facing website – has not been updated since June 2014 and has received just 13 votes to date. No surveys have appeared since March 2014, while the last quiz was published exactly a year ago.

At its launch, the SRA stressed that Legal Choices would help consumers ‘cut a path through advice and guidance that is already out there, and then find exactly what they need’. It didn’t say when, though.

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