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I'm a bit late to this debate as I've been away but, like the above post, my firm was in QS from the quite early days however chose to leave (more quietly than some...) a while ago. Why? Well my perspective of 'QS mark 1' versus 'mark 2' is quite different and I think demonstrates the difficulties in working with a large number of firms with quite different aims. QS mark 1 was exciting and inspiring. Our whole firm was energised behind the ambition of making our mark - as a group - on the wider market. It enabled us to push a programme of internal change management that would have been hard/impossible otherwise - from first contact staff trained in conversion to opening on Saturdays and, yes, even staffing our concession in WHSmith (which, perhaps surprisingly for some people here, actually worked really well for us as a local profile raising exercise and we were quite sorry to have to give it up). Our business was (and remains) significantly better for our involvement - no question - and, contrary to the above post, I always found the management and founders to be exceptional, possessing insight rarely found in my many years of legal market experience. As some others have observed - my personal wish is that the national marketing efforts had been sustained for longer and I still wonder whether the brand penetration that was sought might then have been achieved. What I think happened was the expectations of the first national ads were too high amongst some of the more naive firms and when they didn't have a queue of people out the door, they rushed to judgement and the QS team buckled in the face of this when they should have stayed the course. There was too little understanding of the difference between brand building and lead generation and the firms were too hungry for the latter and not patient enough for the former, in my opinion.

Out of this response was born QS mark 2 and there's no doubt it is a professional support service for law firms. Clearly, for some firms, that's a very useful thing but it's quite different to why we joined. We we're already very well run and don't need compliance or local marketing support etc > we wanted to be part of something bigger that could have enabled our firm to grow very significantly. Once it became that vision of QS was being left by the wayside, the 'support business' held little interest to us and so we left. We did so though very grateful for our time in QS and very supportive of their continued success. Why so many people who have had nothing to do with QS come on here to (prematurely) gloat about their demise is beyond me... QS was, and is, after all a group of solicitor firms just trying to do something to be more successful and who showed some ambition along the way and set-out to improve the experience of using legal services which no-one but the most deluded could argue doesn't have considerable room for improvement!