Press releases from the Legal Services Consumer Panel are vanishingly rare, with just two in the past 15 months. So when one dropped this week, it was a moment to savour. But the realisation failed to match the expectation.

The release was entitled ‘Welsh consumers prefer face-to-face legal consultations’ – not a thrilling start, but we continue. It explained that a tracker survey has revealed ‘significant differences’ in the preferences of Welsh consumers compared with those in England.

These amount to 62% of Welsh respondents preferring to meet their lawyer face-to-face, compared with 54% in England. And 84% of Welsh consumers said an in-person meeting would increase their trust in lawyers, versus 76% in England.

Meanwhile 89% of legal services consumers in Wales and 85% in England were satisfied with the quality of advice they received. Obiter wonders whether a four percentage point gap amounts to ‘significant differences’.

Such statistical revelations aside, it was difficult to see the point of these findings. Tony Hayhoe, chair of the LSCP, sounded like he was trying to convince himself when he added: ‘The Tracker Survey Welsh Briefing offers crucial perspectives on what consumers in Wales truly desire from their legal services.’ There was no insight into what made the Welsh market marginally different to across the border, and no advice for firms in how to make use of such research.

We suppose that there is merit in finding regional differences in how clients access their lawyers, although when such differences are as insignificant as reported here, the exercise seems a little pointless. Probably not worth the panel’s infrequent press release department to bother itself with. Anyone might think this quango is trying to justify its own existence.

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