Solicitors offering wills are quite rightly worried about how they will compete with new providers, both on- and off-line, as they increasingly enter the market.
If matching these interlopers on price isn’t an option because of the higher regulatory costs faced by law firms, then the obvious approach is to outclass them by emphasising quality over cost; to highlight the fact that wills written by solicitors are more legally sound, and less risky, than those drawn up by non-solicitors.
That argument was dealt a serious blow this week.
As part of its research project into whether will-writers should be regulated, the Legal Services Consumer Panel took on a panel of experts, including solicitors, to assess a sample of 101 wills. The experts judging the wills had no idea whether they had been drafted by solicitors, will-writers, or indeed a chap who had just stepped off the Clapham Omnibus.
But solicitors firms should be aware of what they found.
One in four of the wills was ‘failed’ by the panel, and more than one in three was scored as either ‘poor’, or ‘very poor’. The worrying aspect for the profession is that just as many of the failed wills were drawn up by solicitors as by will-writers.
And it was not just the difficult ones; simple wills were almost as likely to fail the test as those covering more complex circumstances.
So what were the problems? To quote the report itself:
‘Key problems where the will was not legally valid or did not meet the client’s stated requirements, were: inadequate treatment of the client’s needs; the client’s requests not being met; potentially illegal actions; inconsistent or contradictory language; insufficient detail; and poor presentation.
‘Key problems relating to poor advice include: cutting and pasting of precedents; unnecessary complexity; and use of outdated terminology.’
No doubt many readers will feel safe in the knowledge that this does not apply to their firm. But would it do any harm to take a sample of recent wills and check them against those points? Particularly the problem of over-complexity.
The report adds that the evidence suggests a need to raise standards ‘across the market’, as the quality of wills prepared by solicitors is ‘disappointing’.
It proposes tacking this by strengthening the will-writing elements of the legal practice course, and introducing re-accreditation in the sector.
Re-accreditation would, of course, ladle even greater costs on an already heavily burdened profession; and in doing so would make the need to compete on quality rather than price even greater than ever.
No comments yet