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"The survey of around 1,000 small business owners or managers found 60% perceive cost as a barrier that might limit their access to legal services. But in an online test, small businesses without access to pricing information assumed solicitors were more expensive than the actual costs.

Less than half of small businesses already spent time searching the internet when looking for legal service providers, but 75% would spend more time doing so if more accessible information was available online, the research found. "

These findings seem to be a driver in the new rules, which really just put more flesh on existing obligations. While the various points made about the supposed idiocy of the new publicity requirements have some force, the criticisms seem rather trenchant, almost reactionary. Small businesses I have acted for, and others whose owners I know, have generally expressed grave concerns about the cost of any legal work, which for the most part meant debt recovery - a distressed purchase. Many small businesses will rarely (if ever) have instructed lawyers before, and will have a perception of high costs. Thoughtful freely available basic information could allay fears and lead to more instructions.

For repeat debt collection clients I used to offer a fixed fee service, although most repeat clients preferred to take their chances with hourly rates (realising that the easy cases had to be a tad more costly to pay for the occasional complicated case); for new clients I would generally offer a 'free' half hour meeting (which would often run over) so I could get some idea what the problem was, and the nature of the client.

One usual problem with smaller businesses was that, like ordinary lay clients, they had little conception of legal formalities or rights, and simply establishing the fact of a contract between two or more legal entities could be tricky. Sometimes the putative client had already sued, and got a default judgment, and wanted help with enforcement; on several occasions the judgment was against the wrong entity, or no recognisable legal entity at all. Almost always however, getting judgment was the easy bit.

While my experience is not especially recent, I imagine the same problems can still arise. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me that lawyers should be able and willing to triage this kind of work, so can reasonably early on give the client a fairish idea of the likely cost, with contingencies (which won't always be known or anticipated by the client at the outset).

There will be cases where predicting the future course of a case may be impossible - in which case what is wrong with advising the client that it will cost between X and Y to analyse the matter, at which point further conversations can be had about further likely cost?