Legal Choices site exceeds visitor number targets

Legal Choices, the consumer-facing website run by legal regulators, including CILEx Regulation, saw over 1.3 million visitors in the last year, according to its annual report for 2022.

The site, which is seeing “visitors on average spending more time on the site than in previous years” and has “significantly exceeded [its] reach targets”, extended its disciplinary record search function to include data from the Legal Ombudsman and the Bar Standards Board.

As a result, the search, which helps consumers check the disciplinary record of a regulated lawyer without having to know who regulates them, now includes disciplinary decisions about barristers and decisions about service complaints against all providers regulated under the Legal Services Act.

According to Legal Choices, this ‘Help me trust my legal adviser’ function “has the potential to help give legal services users peace of mind when choosing a legal professional”, with Google searches driving more than 400,000 visits to this part of the site.

Its tool for renters facing eviction has also been updated with the creation of a dedicated version of for users in Wales, addressing differences in landlord and tenant law between England and Wales.

Over the year, its interactive quiz on workplace discrimination was viewed almost 80,000 times and its law dictionary, aimed at defining legal terms in plain English, was viewed almost 100,000 times. The most-viewed definition since the dictionary’s launch was ‘constructive dismissal’, while last year it was ‘judicial precedent’.

In his introduction to the report, Howard Dellar, chair of the Legal Choices governance board, said: “New content is being written specifically to address popular search queries, boost the search engine exposure of Legal Choices content and generate more organic (unpaid) traffic. Our aim is to supplement traffic from advertising with a much higher volume of organic traffic.

“Engaging users directly in design and development has always been a key part of the way Legal Choices works. Based on recent experience, we expect up to 10 million people to visit the Legal Choices website over the next five years.”