Exploring future approaches to enable easier comparison of legal services
While the public finds customer reviews and comparison websites helpful in choosing a legal services provider, barriers remain to making factual information on services and performance more readily available.
This was the key finding of a year-long pilot run by CILEx Regulation, the Solicitors Regulation Authority, and Council for Licensed Conveyancers. The pilot looked into how to provide more information about the quality of legal services and the role of reviews and comparison websites.
More than 6,000 members of the public and 250 firms took part in surveys and focus groups.
The Quality Indicators in legal services evaluation report suggests approaches that regulators might use to encourage more consumers to use reviews to help them when selecting a legal services provider. Key findings include:
- Engagement with customer review websites is far higher among both the public and law firms than for sites comparing price or other factual information about legal services providers.
- Barriers to comparison sites being more widely used within the legal market include a lack of public awareness, the complex nature of legal services and the relatively limited range of data available on firms profiled.
- Nearly half of law firms (44%) encourage existing clients to post reviews to third party sites and the majority who do this see it as providing a positive business benefit.
- In terms of prices, many firms felt that their own websites, where prices could be set in wider context with background information, was a more appropriate place to make such information accessible. Introduced in 2019, our Transparency Rules require our firms providing specific legal services to publish key price and service information online for specified legal services.
During the pilot, review sites including Trustpilot, ReviewSolicitors and Law Superstore reported a significant increase in the number of reviews submitted, visits to their site and number of firms taking active ownership of their profile.
Robert Morris, CILEx Regulation Interim CEO, said: ‘We are pleased to have worked with the SRA and CLC on this valuable opportunity to gain an in-depth understanding of the world of customer reviews and digital comparison websites. We would like to thank the review websites and pilot firms for so openly engaging with the pilot and enabling us to improve our understanding of the services provided by CRL regulated individuals and firms.
‘This work will feed into our planned evaluation this year of our transparency requirements. We will now build on the pilot findings to identify how law firms, comparison and review websites can continue to improve in this area.’
Paul Philip, Chief Executive of the SRA said: ‘The public increasingly expect to find readily available and comparable information online to help inform their buying decisions. Easy access to the sort of information that allows consumers to compare the quality of the legal services they are looking for benefits both consumers and firms.
‘Our pilot demonstrated that while progress is being made in this area, there is clearly still some way to go in both identifying the most useful indicators of quality and working more closely with those who can help share this data.‘
The pilot explored other quality indicators including the use of data on complaints, errors in conveyancing transactions and employment case outcomes. However, in all these areas challenges exist in identifying data that consumers can readily compare without wider context.
While the pilot is now complete, CRL will continue to explore further ways to expand the use and awareness of information to help the public make informed decisions.
