In a week in which the Legal Services Board has issued another consultation on alternative business structures, I want to speak about the importance of good quality research before important policy proposals are made which may radically affect the legal services market.It has always shocked me that the LSB is about to embark on the most wide-ranging restructuring of the legal profession without a single piece of research. It claims that consumers want this, and that freeing up the market will bring that. But it is unwilling to spend a penny on research to back up its claims. I wonder why?

I attended a breakfast meeting last week in the European parliament on the importance of research before such policy decisions are made. The discussion centred on how you judge whether one legal services market is freer than another. We learned that research shows that reality may be very different to what it seems. The lesson was: research matters.

You may not think that Finland and Germany have anything to do with us. But some of the discussion in the parliament centred on the legal markets in these two countries. The Finnish legal services market (along with the Swedish system, with which it has strong similarities) is among the freest in the world, meaning that anyone can do anything, including representing a client before the Swedish supreme court without a legal qualification. The European Commission loves this and, in studies comparing the state of regulation of lawyers in different member states, Finland is always top of the class.

But Dr Matthias Kilian of Cologne University, a researcher, highlighted how complicated such comparisons can be. He compared the legal services market in Finland with that of Germany. Finland has a zero entrance barrier, since on paper no one needs university training to provide legal services, and there are no final examinations for law students. However, that is not the reality. Although there are no monopoly rights for lawyers, there is also no significant market for legal services for those without university training. In addition, the reason why there is no final exam for law students is that almost 90% of high school graduates wanting to study law are weeded out through a pre-university entrance exam that many applicants pass only after years of preparation through expensive private preparatory schools.

Germany, according to Dr Kilian, features lower in the commission’s benchmarking studies because it has two state law exams, with an overall failure rate of 30%. However, it admits every high school graduate to law school – and 70% of those high school graduates eventually enter the market as legal professionals, whereas in Finland only around 10% of all high school graduates who apply to study law are allowed to do so, as we have seen. Currently, between 75% and 80% of all graduates in Germany become lawyers, whereas in Finland only 19% of the already relatively few graduates go into the legal services market.

Dr Kilian has also looked at lawyers’ fees. Finland does not regulate fees of legal professionals at all, and so again goes straight to the top of the European Commission’s class. However, in the absence of fee regulation, legal costs are difficult to predict for the consumer. The overall legal costs for the average claim with a value of €15,000 in Finland is around €9,200. In Germany, a market where fee regulation exists, the overall legal costs would be less than €5,000. Or, to put it differently: for the costs that have to be paid by a Finnish citizen for a claim worth €15,000, a German could file a claim worth €45,000.

The lesson, as I say, is clear. Research is vital before decisions are made to change legal services markets. The examples I have given above are between shallow research (undertaken by the European Commission) and deeper research (undertaken by Dr Kilian). But when we met the LSB some weeks ago, and requested it to undertake at least some research – any research – before introducing ABSs, it rejected the idea. The Bar Standards Board has also called for prior research. The LSB’s response resembles a hospital going out into the street to ask the first person to come in and perform difficult surgery, without qualifications and without anaesthetic for the patient.

This is absurd. Please, please, LSB, ask qualified academics to study the likely consequences of your actions before you embark on your programme, or its outcome may not be what you plan. You should not be acting in the dark like this.

Jonathan Goldsmith is the secretary general of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe, which represents more than 700,000 European lawyers through its member bars and law societies