The Legal Services Board is to seek further evidence to assess the usefulness of quality schemes for indicating whether law firms provide a good service to consumers, it revealed today.

The LSB has asked its Legal Services Consumer Panel, the body that advises it on the consumer perspective, to carry out further research in relation to quality schemes used by law firms and other legal services advisers.

It has asked the panel to identify what characteristics quality schemes must have to ensure that they are ‘robust and reliable’ indicators of the quality of law firms or other service providers in the schemes.

The panel will then take a selection of quality schemes and measure them against these criteria.

The call for more research follows previous advice from the panel suggesting that consumers do not commonly use quality marks when choosing a legal services provider.

The LSB said it planned to complete its overall work programme on quality assurance by the end of Q4 2011/12.