Reviews could present a simplistic notion of ‘quality’
Recent months have seen increasing attention paid towards the role of quality indicators as advocated by the Competition and Markets Authority’s recent findings into the legal services market.
CILEX and other professional bodies have raised concerns about the dangers of using consumer reviews to assess the quality of lawyers, with CILEX warning of the “intrinsic limitations” of subjective consumer feedback, arguing that the debate must not adopt “an overly simplistic notion of ‘quality’ or of assessment”.
CILEX was responding to a Legal Services Board consultation on quality indicators, which proposed adding consumer feedback to a single digital register for all lawyers and the creation of a “platform operating a standardised customer feedback system”, which would sit alongside commercial comparison sites.
The Bar Council expressed worries about how “unjustifiably negative, and perhaps even malicious, ‘feedback’” left by disgruntled clients would be handled, especially given that roughly half of barristers’ clients who go to court end up being disappointed.
CILEX acknowledged the organic growth of digital comparison tools, the growing digital consumption of legal services and the need for greater online visibility for law firms but urged an iterative approach to “create the space for the right approaches to emerge and be built upon over time and, importantly, demonstrate value to the market itself”.
It also called for a collaborative approach across the profession when it came to quality indicators more generally so that they remain independent of any single legal regulator or professional body.
“Indeed, some of the current ‘quality hallmarks’ in the sector, such as the Conveyancing Quality Scheme administered by the Law Society, have had adverse consequences to competition, limiting consumer choice.
“Run by a single legal professional body and exclusively for their membership, these accreditations, as adopted by other stakeholders such as lenders, have had the effect of creating minimum thresholds, inadvertently giving rise to market barriers for those other legal professionals not able to access them.”
CILEx Regulation, the Council for Licensed Conveyancers and the Solicitors Regulation Authority are currently working on an online reviews pilot, focused initially on conveyancing and employment law services.