The Legal Services Board has published a statutory statement of policy on empowering consumers to better access information about the service and quality of legal services providers. Developed following a consultation and engagement with the legal services regulators and others across the sector, the statement sets expectations for the regulators to ensure legal services providers offer useful information to people and small businesses about the cost and quality of their services and on redress and regulation.
In this vlog, LSB Regulatory Policy Managers Robin Geddes and Tania Hardcastle discuss the contextual backdrop to the statement on empowering consumers, what it means for legal services regulators and consumers and how it addresses some of the key themes and challenges of the 10-year strategy.
Vlog transcript:
Tania : Hello everyone, welcome to the LSB’s vlog. My name is Tania Hardcastle, I am a Regulatory Policy Manager here at the LSB Robin: And I’m Robin Geddes, also a Regulatory Policy Manager.
Tania: Today Robin and I are going to discuss one of our key projects: empowering consumers which falls under two key themes of the strategy – stronger confidence and better services. We recently published a statement on policy that sets the expectations on regulators to ensure consumers have better access to information about the services and quality of legal service providers. To begin with, it would be helpful to understand the backdrop to this piece of work. We know that back in 2016, the Competition and Markets Authority (the UK’s competition regulator which promotes competition for the benefit of consumers) carried out a market study into the legal services sector in England and Wales, which found that few providers made available information on pricing and not many consumers were comparing between legal providers before making their choice. The CMA made recommendations to the regulators to improve transparency in the market, and asked us to report on progress.
Robin: That’s right, and then in 2020 the CMA undertook a review of their market study. The CMA decided that further progress was needed and recommended that the LSB take on the role of coordination and oversight to improve transparency of information that can help consumers make informed choices.
Tania: What have the LSB and the regulators been up to since then?
Robin: So what we really want to do here is put consumers, your typical high street user, at the heart of legal services, and empower them to be able to make the right choice of provider when they have a legal issue. Since 2016, the regulators have implemented new measures to make available more information on price and service to consumers. And then the 2020 recommendations from the CMA focused more on improving what information is already out there, and getting the regulators to think about how to get consumers actively using that information. In order to oversee and co-ordinate their work, we chair the MTCOG – which stands for Market Transparency Co-ordination and Oversight Group. The aim of this group, which the LSB chairs, is for the regulators to share information and insight on what they are doing in this area, and so collaborate on how best to empower consumers.
Tania: That’s great Robin, can you also talk us through some of the work you’ve undertaken as part of the MTCOG group.
Robin: There are a lot of different strands:
- Several regulators, including the SRA, CLC and CILEx Regulation are working on a joint pilot scheme to better understand how consumers use customer feedback and digital comparison tools to inform their choice of provider. We hope that findings from that scheme will help inform new transparency rules, so helping consumers to get access to better information on quality of providers.
- Also, the LSB is leading a working group to develop a single online register of regulated providers. A register like that could help provide a consistent set of data to be used by consumers, comparison tools and other consumer-facing services.
Tania: Thanks Robin. This work will have a big impact on consumers. You mentioned the single digital register and digital comparison tools, and these will help consumers feel empowered to make legal choices. Alongside, this, can you tell me more about the further work LSB has done which informed the statement of policy?
Robin: We did work on quality. We all know that being able to tell the quality of your legal provider is difficult, especially for the average high street consumer who might not have much experience of engaging a legal professional. We issued a paper last year on ‘quality indicators’, by that I mean types of information that demonstrate the quality of legal professionals. So that might include whether they have any disciplinary record, whether they have received any complaints, or information on legal work they have completed successfully. Consumer feedback and customer ratings are also very important. We think they can be useful to other consumers, and we’ve seen an increase in the use of Trustpilot and other review websites, in the last few years.
We also have data on the pricing of legal services and we’ve found an increase over the last few years in the number of providers making available information on their prices and cost structure. The Legal Services Consumer Panel also runs its tracker survey, which provides annual data on key stats like how many people are shopping around, how many people feel confident navigating the market.
Tania: Well clearly Robin, a lot of thought and research went on behind the scenes, before the policy statement was developed. We’ve had lots of engagement with sector, and other stakeholders beyond just the regulators, for example, you’ve had engagement from consumer groups, digital comparison tools. Tell us a bit more about the policy statement on empowering consumers for the benefit of our viewers. What exactly is it?
Robin: Our new statement of policy sets expectations of what the regulators should be doing to better empower consumers to understand and engage with the legal services market. We really want the regulators to take action to improve things in their particular parts of the market. So we’ve set overall outcomes that consumers should have the knowledge and capability to recognise when their problem is a legal one and can engage effectively with the legal services market. And then as well as that, regulators should ensure that there is useful information on providers available to consumers.
Tania: Thanks very much Robin, and we know there are some specific expectations around information on pricing and quality. What are those?
Robin: We think consumers should be able to know what the price of their legal services purchase is, even if it is an estimate. So regulators should be thinking about what measures can they put in place to make sure that providers are giving consumers information about the likely price of their service before they buy. We have then set out suggestions for more details that providers could make available: like how the costs are calculated and any fixed fees or hourly rates. On quality, we are building on our work on quality indicators. We think disciplinary information and decisions by the Legal Ombudsman should be made available for all providers.
Tania: There are specific expectations on public legal education, to ensure that consumers and citizens know about their rights and know when something is a legal issue and they need to get legal advice. How can regulators contribute to it?
Robin: As you say, empowering consumers isn’t just about giving them information when they’re looking for a lawyer. Wider public legal education is very important, so consumers and citizens know about their rights and know when something is a legal issue and they need to get legal advice. We expect regulators to get involved in collaborative initiatives with each other, and other important stakeholders, including charities, academics, consumer representatives and government initiatives. At the moment, the BSB is regularly chairing cross-sector meetings to advance this agenda, and we understand that there are various initiatives being advanced, for example some cross-regulator guidance on those using immigration services. There is also a website, Legal Choices, established by the regulators to give consumers better information about the sector on that website.
Tania: That’s interesting to hear. Collaboration is a strong theme coming out of this piece of work. We’ve worked with regulators, digital comparison tools providers, membership organisations and consumer support groups to get here. Collaboration also underpins the reshaping legal services strategy. Now, if we look back at the sector-wide strategy then, the statement on empowering consumers addresses several challenges. One of the key themes of the strategy is Stronger confidence and under that we have the challenge ‘ensuring high quality legal services and strong professional ethics’ and the challenge ‘closing gaps in consumer protection’. These are relevant because consumers should have access to redress such as access to the legal ombudsman so that they are aware of what their options are. Another relevant key theme is ‘Better services’ and under that, the challenge ’empowering consumers to obtain high quality and affordable services’ which speaks directly to the intention behind the empowering consumers statement, because that is exactly what it was designed to do just that.
And on that note, we come to the end of this video. Thank you very much Robin and thank you all for listening and for your attention
Robin: We hope you enjoyed watching the video and found the discussion interesting and helpful. If you have any questions or would like to contribute a piece of content for the microsite, please email us at contact@reshapinglegalservices.org.uk.
Thank you.
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