The promotion of freelance solicitors has been pushed through with little consideration of the impact on clients, or even whether clients really understand what they are.

That is the verdict of the Legal Services Consumer Panel, which has asked why the Solicitors Regulation Authority is not doing more to ensure people using freelance solicitors know what protections they have.

The prompt for the panel’s plea was the SRA’s consultation on amendments to regulations introduced in 2019 allowing a solicitor to provide reserved legal services without needing to be authorised as a recognised sole practitioner. So far, 571 solicitors have taken this opportunity.

The SRA’s consultation was supported by research suggesting that freelancers benefit by enjoying more flexibility and independence. Freelance solicitors are required to have ‘adequate and appropriate’ indemnity insurance and the SRA says there have been ‘very few’ misconduct reports about this new category of practitioner.

But the consumer panel points out that the SRA’s research was skewed towards solicitors and not clients. Just 14 individual consumers and 10 SMEs were interviewed on how the new system has worked, compared with 198 freelance solicitors.

Sarah Chambers, consumer panel chair, said much of the SRA’s understanding of how consumers were treated was gained ‘by proxy’ from the solicitors themselves. She was concerned at the SRA’s inaction over concerns about allowing solicitors to practise with fewer safeguards, stating there was little reliable data on whether consumers are being made aware of, or fully understand, the differences in the freelance practice model.

‘The report specifically states that it is not clear that the same level of informed understanding about the protections available is held by consumers of freelance solicitors as compared to consumers of solicitors operating within a regulated entity,’ said Chambers.

‘Some freelance solicitors are unable to procure professional indemnity insurance or feel it is not necessary,’ she added, ‘and though they are obliged to disclose this to consumers, there does not appear to be any data to indicate whether this is actually being done.’

Chambers added that given the history of ‘silent sufferers’ it was not appropriate to equate few complaints with there being no evidence of harm.

 

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