The Legal Services Board envisages a time when using quality comparison tools will be the norm. Indeed, the super-regulator has even pondered compelling law firms to appear on platforms comparing prices or performance. That followed repeated calls from competition watchdogs for action to boost consumer choice.
For now at least, the nuclear option of compulsion appears to have been quietly shelved. One reason for this surely lies in this week’s report from the Solicitors Regulation Authority on its comparison website pilot. As the LSB’s avatar, the SRA naturally talks up the profession’s engagement with review websites (price comparison sites remain anathema). More than four out of 10 firms encourage clients to post reviews about them. What is sorely lacking however, is meaningful data that would enable consumers to gauge the value of those reviews. And as Sherlock Holmes said, it is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data.
Take conveyancing and employment law, the two services examined in the pilot. HM Land Registry requisitions may be useful to clients of conveyancers, it avers, but ‘there are challenges in making this data accessible and in a format that makes it easy to compare firms’. For employment, meanwhile, the pilot ‘found it difficult to identify any quality indicators which could act as a reliable proxy for the wide and varied range of cases or services’. (Couldn’t the same be said of almost any legal service?)
‘Challenges’ is a nicely understated word. Turns out evaluating a lawyer is rather more involved than giving your Uber driver five stars or rating the quality of your hotel breakfast a perfect 10. Still, the SRA is on a mission. The quest for copper-bottomed comparators will go on.
In the meantime, I for one will continue to rely on my own network of friends and family on those pleasingly rare occasions when I need to call a lawyer. My Gazette colleagues feel similarly. A straw poll in the office found that a large majority rely on past experience or a personal recommendation when choosing a solicitor – though some will read reviews too. As one of them says: ‘It’s just too important to trust a comparison site.’
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