CILEx Regulation
How your clients are experiencing legal services
Over 80% of consumers are happy with the services they receive - find out more about how your clients experience the services you provide.
Understanding consumers’ experience of legal services is important to us, our firms and practitioners. That is why we gather information from a variety of sources to feed into our work to help you support people needing legal services. It also provides an indication of the impact of regulatory changes, for example, the requirement for increased transparency of price and service information for the consumer.
​In August, the Legal Services Consumer Panel published its annual Tracker Survey reports based on a survey, in February/March this year, of 3,623 people who had used legal services in the last two years. The reports offer valuable insights into how consumers choose and use legal services and indicate how the legal services market is developing over time. The findings reveal the following:
- Increasing numbers of consumers comparing price and services before choosing a legal provider: 30% in 2020 compared with 23% in 2012. The greater availability of information may be feeding into this increased tendency to shop around.
- A fall in consumers remembering seeing details about staff, services, and timescales: 35% in 2020 down from 40% in 2019. We would have expected publication of more information to result in an increase.
- Most consumers found price information easy to understand, suggesting providers are presenting costs in a consumer-friendly way.
- Consumers frequently found the price of their case by talking to their provider than in another way.
- More consumers thought price important (72%) compared with 2012 (66%).
- Consumers felt they had a good choice of providers: 74% in 2020, an increase from 68% in 2016.
- Reputation remains the top factor in choosing a legal provider (81%), followed by price (72%); specialism (71%); speed of delivery (68%); and local office (66%).
- Consumers were happy with both service received (84%) and outcome (88%).
- Satisfaction in delivery of service was highest for face to face (91%), while for online (73%).
- Legal services were mostly delivered face to face (44%), with online delivery increasing to 34% from 21% in 2012. Delivery by post was at its lowest (7%) since 2012 (16%).
It will be interesting to see how the changes we have all experienced with working and accessing services is reflected in future surveys.