This week’s news that price comparison site Moneysupermarket.com is getting into personal injury leads, or referrals as lawyers might see them, is more interesting than it seems in terms of regulation and the new landscape of what a legal business actually is.

Last year in September the website launched three other ‘types’ of legal business leads – employment, wills and conveyancing – and told us it would ‘shortly’ be launching PI leads. But Moneysupermarket’s lawyers were concerned they would need a licence from the Ministry of Justice to sell PI leads, so the company applied for one.

Six months later the licence is finally granted, turning paaleads.com, the leads company behind Moneysupermarket, and the website into a licensed claims management company (as far as I can tell). In the week running up to our breaking this story all was chaos, it seemed, over at Moneysupermarket, as the MoJ said it had granted the licence but couldn’t accept a BACS payment, hadn’t cleared their cheque and refused to fax the licence over prior to posting it.

Couple of points of interest there, I think.

First, why on earth should it take six months for the MoJ to authorise any business to do this? The MoJ might be the government department involved in the Legal Services Act but it sure doesn’t seem to be helping its implementation. Second, why does Moneysupermarket need a licence to sell PI leads but not employment, conveyancing or wills leads? Third, what kind of antediluvian world is the MoJ living in? That last question is rhetorical, of course, though feel free to leave your answer in the comment box below.

A tangential issue this story raised is that organisations that want to put themselves between consumers and lawyers to enable high-quality legal advice need to do a lot more if they’re going to compete with price comparison sites for attention.

When I called the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers for a quote on the story (which didn’t make it in), APIL’s head of comms Lorraine Gwinnutt said ‘we need to do a lot more work to help people find a personal injury lawyer’, which is why APIL launched its ‘People First’ initiative. Moneysupermarket’s move ‘emphasises why we need to keep telling people where they can go to find legal advice’, she said.

Too right – choice for consumers is good, and the availability of that choice can only be enhanced by price comparison sites getting in on the act. But certain groups could end up being squeezed out of consumers’ ‘headspace’ unless they’re careful, and that can’t be good.