The Solicitors Regulation Authority is not an organisation that is unused to criticism. Anyone who reads the comments section of the Gazette online will attest to that.

The flak doesn’t usually come from its own board members, though. However the SRA’s brainwave of a ‘consumer-facing website’ (as opposed to those websites that face away from users, Obiter muses) came in for some critical comment last week.

Lay member Peter Phippen described the proposal for the Legal Choices site as ‘littered with jargon’ while others compared it unfavourably with a ‘legal Trip Advisor’. Another lay member, Sara Nathan, suggested that some of the pictures of contact centre staff, each with a beaming smile, were a little misleading.

‘Are we quite sure we want to send that out as a message?’ asked Nathan. ‘It would be much more effective if we were not quite so optimistic about the use of the contact centre as a first point of call.’

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