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There is a clear market for both types of service – qualified lawyers and unqualified MFs. For clients who need legal support in their lives, their choice of service will not just depend on fiscal imperatives (although I have no doubt that for some it probably is). It is also based on a number of other critical factors: KNOWLEDGE: their ability to research and interpret it competently enough. CONFIDENCE: to deal with their own case preparation – strategy, organisation and administration. CONTROL: their desire and need to control their case completion timeline if they are working.. RISK PROFILE: their ability to assess the stakes involved should the outcome be undesirable in terms of reputation damage or an unaffordable financial burden.
Some or all of these factors will play a part in a client’s decision to use a lawyer to take over entirely, or to just entrust a MF to help them DIY their own case.
The challenge for MF’s is to know their true market and to steer potential clients accordingly if they erroneously knock of the wrong door out of desperation or ignorance. That is to ensure the best outcome of them (always the main priority here) and to make them aware that MFs have a duty to the court, first and foremost, and that there is a limit on what they may offer them constitutionally. That, in addition to having a good enough basic knowledge of the court system and the particular field they choose to specialise in so that they can add additional value, where necessary if that is what the client requires. There is absolutely no reason at all why bundled service solicitors should feel that MKs will tread on their toes by offering clients an unbundled service they are yet unwilling to provide, any more than MFs will feel that solicitors are treading on their own toes by taking on a whole case instead of some parts of it. The legal services market is changing and it is challenging, so it is better to get used to it. The very worst thing solicitors could do, I suggest, is to ‘unbundle’ out of fear of losing market share due to legal aid cuts and offer potential MF clients with a half-hearted quasi solicitor service and, in doing so, risk damaging their hard won reputations with complaints that they never made it clear what they could do for the fee and what they could not do – as MFs. Reassuringly for solicitors, most of the work they would continue to undertake is far beyond the intellectual scope of unqualified MF with no law degree or training - both in terms of case preparation and legal knowledge.