In this vlog, we hear from Sarah Chambers, Chair of the Legal Services Consumer Panel (LSCP), an independent arm of the Legal Services Board which provides evidenced-based advice to the Legal Services Board, in order to help them make decisions that are shaped around the needs of users. The Panel has a remit to represent the interests of the many different consumers of legal services.
Below, you can watch Sarah talk about the LSCP and its role in improving legal services for all.
Transcript:
I wonder how many of you watching this vlog know that a third of people with a legal problem don’t get any help with a legal problem from an actual lawyer.
You also might not know that minority ethnic consumers are much less likely to have a will, and are in general less satisfied with legal services (when they do succeed in accessing them) than White British consumers are.
I expect you will not be surprised to hear that there is a lot of evidence that consumers in vulnerable circumstances have particular difficulties in having their legal needs met.
But you probably don’t know much, if anything, about the Legal Services Consumer Panel, which has identified many of these problems and is trying to grapple with them.
My name is Sarah Chambers, and I chair the Legal Services Consumer Panel. We are a small independent body with the job of advising the Legal Services Board and other legal regulators such as the Solicitors Regulation Authority, with the aim of ensuring that the consumers’ voice is heard and that all our legal regulators put users at the forefront of their work.
We conduct research and an annual Tracker Survey to bring to light the progress – or lack of progress in some cases – of the legal sector in helping consumers with their legal problems.
We are happy to support the LSB’s sector-wide strategy to Reshape Legal Services, as it speaks directly to some of the serious issues we have observed.
The LSB have identified three over-riding objectives in their strategy: Fairer Outcomes; Better Services; and Stronger Confidence.
The problems we have identified through our Tracker Survey and other research are all tractable. Solutions can be found to all of them, and those solutions tend to support all three of the objectives identified by the LSB. There are no silos here.
For example, problems around affordability can be addressed, in part, through the use of unbundling. This is where consumers can take on some of the more straightforward work often done at substantial cost by qualified lawyers – such as completing forms or filing documents. This can materially reduce the cost of legal services, thus leading to fairer outcomes (through reducing unmet legal need), and better services.
By encouraging lawyers to focus on building trust with minority ethnic consumers and on understanding how best to communicate with them, we can go some way to ensuring that those consumers receive the quality of service they deserve. That builds stronger confidence and better services (through fostering innovation around consumer needs).
Highlighting effective communication through plain language and, where appropriate, the use of trusted intermediaries, helps lawyers to ensure that their clients understand what they are saying. This leads to fairer outcomes and stronger confidence.
We see the same themes coming up over and over again – different clients, or individuals who would like to be clients as they have an unmet legal need, asking for the same things: ways to make legal services more accessible, more understandable, and more trustworthy.
This is what we at the Consumer Panel are trying to achieve: an ongoing ethical and innovative approach, which will reach those individuals and communities that lawyers are currently struggling to reach.
The problems we identify through our surveys, and through research funded by LSB and others, are inextricably linked.
So if we all work together towards achieving fairer outcomes for all clients and would-be or should-be clients, towards building stronger confidence in the legal sector by all parts of society, and better services overall, both the lawyers who offer their services and the individuals and charities and businesses who need them, all stand to benefit.
My colleagues on the Consumer Panel will address some of these themes in more detail in the coming months on this site, so I hope you will look out for them.
Thank you for listening!
More stories
