The Gazette of 19 January contained two separate items that can be usefully linked: one a call to help the public, the other a warning of how such help can be turned against us.

Grania Langdon-Down’s article on the difficulties of managing civil litigation with an increasing number of litigants in person reports the suggestion of the Civil Justice Council that legal professionals ‘sell small amounts of their time or take on one or two defined pieces of work in the course of a case’.

When I started in practice nearly 40 years ago, I considered offering litigants in person exactly that. A drop-in service, open evenings and Saturday mornings, in a welcoming shopfront office stocked with all the court leaflets, ‘how to...’ guides and typing facilities - and with me on hand to give free 15-minute advice on how best to present their case. I was not doing it to get business - the cases would be low-value - but as a service to the community and to the court.

A perusal of the solicitors liability sections in Cordery on Solicitors convinced me that my offer of help would be abused. No matter how much one might stress to the litigant in person that one was offering only a well-intentioned guide to presentation of documents and witnesses, and general comments about procedure, even if one got them to sign a disclaimer accepting that limitation, it was all too likely that a losing litigant would claim that I should have advised them further and better, and that insurers and the courts would hold me liable.

Which is precisely what seems to have happened in Padden v Bevan Ashford, judging from the report of the case in the Court of Appeal. There is a distressed client; two local firms refuse to help; the client finally sees a newly qualified solicitor for 15 minutes’ free advice; the client is advised not to sign over her interest in the matrimonial home to her husband but does so nevertheless; the client sues the solicitor.

I do not make any comment on the correctness of the decision in that case, which has been remitted for retrial.

My point is a general one: that the law on solicitors’ liability tends to impose the same absolute standard of care, whether we are giving an anxious member of the public general off-the-cuff comments intended to explain and reassure, or advising a multinational on cutting-edge commercial work in consultation with a silk.

Until insurers and judges recognise that the two are very different, it is unsurprising if solicitors decline the invitation of the Civil Justice Council to offer ‘dip in, dip out’ help to litigants in person. Our advice would necessarily be limited; our liability might not.

John Baird, Southport