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As much as I as a consumer prefer to see prices up front for any product or service, as somebody very involved in the structure and publication of pricing for conveyancing within the firm I work for, I agree with most of the points made both for and against the forced publishing of prices. I feel that price transparency (whether published or not) is more of an issue, particularly amongst firms that DO publish their prices (at least in conveyancing). I won't get into this other than to say that having comparison sites that require a set structure do benefit the consumer, because getting multiple estimates directly from firms' own website can be very difficult to compare, especially when firms put lots of their fees in small print (even though they apply to the majority of cases); this causes a negative experience of the service from day one for the consumer.

My biggest concern is that what I feel is the most important finding (concerning consumers of legal services) from the CMA report, is buried deep within it and (probably for this very reason) appears to have been entirely overlooked by the CMA themselves, the SRA, and everyone that has commented on this article so far. That is (according to the CMAs findings) that only 22% of consumers compare multiple firms in the first place. I feel that for those that do, there is currently sufficient comparison services and easy to find information on comparing the quality and cost of the services most likely to be approached with a modern consumer mindset.

The challenge is to address the problem that ~78% of legal services consumers don't do any comparison. If that is a problem (you may not agree that it is) according to the CMA, having more comparison tools and forcing firms to publish prices won't make any difference at all, because that won't magically make more people use them or do manual comparisons.

Take conveyancing for example (because it's what I know), if we want to encourage people to compare firms before they instruct, the simplest solution is for the providers of the service which every person transacting property uses (I would love to hear an argument against this) = property comparison sites e.g. Rightmove and Zoopla, to deliver a prominent message to all of their users that they should start thinking about legal service providers and doing comparisons from the very first second that people are in a situation (buying/selling a house) where they will eventually need a conveyancer. The only barrier to doing this is that (at least the two services I have mentioned) they already have their own partnerships with a single (or own their own) firm of solicitors (or limited capacity panel with a biased distribution method).

I assume (but currently have no idea) that the situation is similar for the other (mentioned in the article) situations in which people need legal advice/services such as wills and family law, as well as business services (the likes of which Lexoo cater to).

As a final comment, I think the Lexoo model is excellent (though neither a significant solution nor hindrance to a solution to the CMA findings) where an (hopefully) unbiased third-party selects multiple (of the most suitable) legal service providers to respond to enquiries, offering equal opportunity to compete for business, without overloading the consumer with unnecessary and inconsistently structured information and methods of communication. I also hold in high regard The Law Superstore and what they've brought to the industry in terms of the way their system works (for the most part, but nothing's perfect).