Most legal 'consumers' are happy. Why aren’t consumer watchdogs?

One assumes that part of the remit of the Legal Services Consumer Panel is to ensure that consumers of legal services are satisfied.

If so, may I heartily congratulate them on a job well done. According to the panel’s own survey of 3,500 consumers, 85% said they were satisfied with the service provided. This was unchanged year-on-year and six percentage points higher than in 2012.

These figures are remarkable, given the costly and unpredictable nature of legal services – not to mention that in litigation there is a 50% chance that you lose.

So it’s down the pub and raise a toast to our high-achieving legal sector? Apparently not.

The only mention of satisfaction in the consumer panel’s press release on the survey was to say that people who were happy with their lawyer were twice as likely to have received face-to-face services than those who were not (we can file that piece of insight alongside bears’ toiletry habits).

Instead, the focus – as it habitually seems to be – was on the fall in people shopping around, and their relative difficulty in finding information about how long legal services would take and whether lawyers were insured.

Shopping around has become an infatuation for regulators and consumer watchdogs. They envisage a world where time-rich clients peruse comparison and review websites, intuitive and informed enough to spot unreliable entries and knowing exactly what makes a law firm worth instructing. They treat legal services like any other commodity and seem perturbed when consumers seem to disagree.

Consumers are shopping around more, in comparison to the last decade and before. But perhaps there comes a point where we just accept that legal services are different.

Consumers trust the opinion of friends and family because that is the most reliable barometer of quality. They favour the high street firm in their local town because they might know the solicitor from the school pick-up or the local sports club, or because – and brace yourselves for this one regulatory wonks – they like being able to pop in and see their lawyer in person.

There is nothing wrong with that, you might think. But the fly in the ointment is the nebulous concept of unmet need. This is the finger-in-the-air idea of plucking out numbers of people who need legal services but do not access them. The theory goes that if only there was a meerkat or Welsh opera singer pointing them to a comparator of legal services then they would come forward in their droves.

There may be some truth in that. It is possible that if people had easy access to price information or anecdotal evidence about whether a similar service to a completely different client with different needs was well-delivered, then they would pay for legal advice.

It’s just that the evidence year-on-year is that there is a limit to how much people want to shop around. And despite the improvements around transparency (law firms required by the SRA to publish their prices, for example) this is still not enough.

The legal regulators and watchdogs partly pursue this agenda because they are under pressure to do something in response to the Competition and Markets Authority, which took a dim view of the information made available to consumers by the profession. Protestations that shopping for legal services is different to insurance or healthcare are met with familiar jibes that the profession is protectionist and unwielding. 

The consumer panel chair said she was ‘concerned’ that shopping around has fallen post-pandemic. That assumes shopping around is in their best interests, and yet large number of consumers have decided it is not. And if most of those are happy with the outcome, why can’t the consumer watchdog be happy as well?

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