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Very often, my clients were immeasurably wealthier than I was, and they were commercially-experienced hard-nosed people. It was very much a relationship of equals; nobody was deferring to anybody. Any corporate lawyer knows how bullish corporate clients can be. If you do something which doesn’t please them, they sure as heck know how to complain - to you, on the phone, there and then! And any issues will be sorted out like that, between adults, without filling in forms. The SRA et al live in a world where clients are deemed to be helpless simpletons and lawyers are deemed to be incompetent by default; they derive their policies from this patronising worldview, and they then impose it on all lawyers, even when it is manifestly ill-judged and un-necessary for any lawyer routinely dealinhg with corporate clients. Solicitors already provide way too much bumph when being instructed. When in corporate private practice, a new client, on receiving a mandatory "client care" letter, invariably would ring me up and ask "what’s all this cr@p?" I'd explain that it was something we were obliged to do, by our supervisory body, and not to be alarmed or upset by it. Many of my new clients felt somewhat slighted by client care letters. They trusted me, we had a decent working relationship already, and they viewed the client care letter as tone deaf claptrap which set the working relationship back.