(thanks to New Yorker)
Showing posts with label clients. Show all posts
Showing posts with label clients. Show all posts
Monday, 10 September 2012
Thursday, 4 August 2011
Mea COLPa and the Lawyer's Gone Bust...
Two separate items in Legal Futures raise concerns about lawyers and their relationships within their own firms and with their clients. They tell different sides of the same story, from inside and outside the law firm.
The first is that many firms haven't begun to train their staff in risk and compliance for when outcomes focussed regulation begins October. Yes, three months.
The second is that there has been a steep rise in compensation claims against solicitors. The figure is now over £200 million.
New figures from the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) said the value of the 1,952 open claims against the Solicitors Compensation Fund at the end of June was £205m, £76m more than at the same time in 2010, even though there were almost 1,000 more claims open then.I wrote before that law firms are confused and perplexed by who should be their compliance officer for legal practice and what that officer ought to be doing. By October 2012 the COLP has to submit a report on the preceding year. That means having all the reporting and accounting systems in place now, or by October at the latest.
If law firms can't get their compliance act together then how are they going to respond to client complaints? How will they catch dishonest lawyers? Note that law firms have also to appoint a COFA (compliance officer for finance and administration) too. If these processes are fully functioning will clients have confidence?
Perhaps, instead of trying to kill off Rick Kordowski's Solicitors from Hell, the Law Society and Bar Council should be prompting their members to start thinking and acting to ensure clients are satisfied, well-served, and confident in the legal profession.
Adam Sampson, the Legal Ombudsman, wrote recently that customer service will be the key criterion
What is important here is the introduction of the concept of customer service as a basic standard against which barristerial actions are to be judged. I know from my own experience that the vast majority of barristers take their responsibility to their client as their central, driving motivation. However, there remain a small number of the profession who see customer service as something which is wholly the responsibility of the solicitor and therefore not a matter with which they need to concern themselves. It is this small group who may struggle to adjust to the new reality.Barristers, it seems, have not yet adjusted to a non-adversarial complaints system where they can "prove" their innocence. That will be only one part of the process.
Lawyers must realize that the new world of legal services won't wait for them to catch up from the 19th century to the 21st. We know other suppliers will jump in and begin to mop up. It might be Coop or it might be Quality Solicitors, but it won't be the lawyers who stand there with question marks over their heads. Whoever works out that consistently good service across all fronts to all clients improves business will win.
Thursday, 7 January 2010
Do You Know What Lawyers Do?
(Thanks to rutty)
All of these people avoided going to lawyers. Lawyers were expensive, remote, and alien. I wasn't.
So when the Legal Services Board published research recently with the headline:
68% of Consumers Have "Little or No Knowledge" of What Lawyers Do
According to the LSB's research more than 60% of respondents had used legal services, and 53% of them within the past 5 years. Did they shop around for the right lawyer? No. Only 14% did that. The purchase of legal services appears to be crisis buying rather than pleasure-based purchasing.
Of course, the above applies mainly to individual consumers rather than business users. Having said that I should modify this statement because small and medium enterprises (SMEs) do have difficulty in finding appropriate and cheap legal services. This is why groups such as the Federation of Small Businesses run legal advice schemes for their members.
The basic problem with most research in this area is that our definitions of legal needs are fuzzy and imperfect. Early studies by the American Bar Foundation showed that the public only obtained legal services for a small proportion of their legal needs. Indeed, a widely-quoted paperon the life histories of disputes, for example, showed that the most common form of dispute resolution is "lumping it".
Bert Kritzer looked at the studies on legal needs in a 2008 paper, Examining the Real Demand for Legal Services. He identified the main problem as a lack of clear baseline data. We need to survey the entire population. There are indications in the extant research (in the US) that cost is not the determinative factor in the use of legal services, but rather lack of knowledge.
Lack of knowledge comes in two forms. First, there is the lack of understanding that a problem might have a legal aspect, eg. stopping of welfare benefits. Second, there is a lack of knowing that a lawyer might be able to help in this situation.
It is these types of knowledge deficits that open opportunities for ambulance chasers, debt consolidators, and claims handling companies who are eager to prise money out of clients than solving their problems.
Lawyers are to blame if consumers don't understand what they do. Despite changes in legal procedure the abandonment of legal Latin (in the UK), the major growth is in the use of ombudsmen and other informal resolution procedures. Institutions that don't require the intercession of lawyers.
And this is where Tesco Law will make its impact. With simplicity, ease of use, friendly representatives, transparent costings, extended opening hours, ready communication, and a firm quality control.
At the moment most lawyers haven't a clue how to respond to that and that is assuming they are aware there is a problem.
Wednesday, 17 June 2009
Straight There No Detours
Avis Whyte and I have just finished an article derived from the research we did for the Bar Council on direct access to clients. It can be downloaded here.
The Bar has been a referral profession for many years and now it is attempting to reconfigure itself towards direct dealings with clients. This has a serious impact on the manner in which the Bar constitutes itself as a profession.
Our conclusion reads:
Modernity unsettles professional certainties. For four centuries the Bar has enjoyed many privileges (Prest 1986) but there has been a hollowing out of its professional core as its reserved areas have come under threat. The gradual erosion of the referral aspects of barristers’ relationships with solicitors and others exposes barristers to the contingencies of the market in a raw form not usually experienced. The rising intervention of the state into the lawyer-client relationship through the control of the legal aid budget is accelerating these moves. These are moves to bureaucratic control and potential proletarianization (Larson 1977: 232). The Bar is losing its grip on its professional project. Or is it? Muzio and Ackroyd (2008: 49) argue we are not observing the end of professionalism but rather various defensive manoeuvres by professionals to maintain their privileges.How does the rise in direct access work fit with the changes in the Bar? In part it has to do with what Boon and Levin (2008: 77) described as “The legal services market has a multitude of sites in which different norms proliferate.” Barristers occupy many positions outside traditional private practice. They are in business, government, the Crown Prosecution Service, and even inside solicitors’ firms. And when we add to the mix an increasing diversity of professional members in gender and ethnicity, common cultural values change and may not hold. This is reinforced by the division in work at the Bar between those who largely undertake publicly aided work and those who act for private clients. Barristers paid by the state operate under considerable control in terms of what they can do and what they can charge for their labour. No equivalent constraints fall on private client practitioners: they function within the market. Further controls are imposed by chambers arrangements which are becoming more corporate in focus. Chambers are increasingly specialized in their practice areas. They target potential lateral hires, including groups of practitioners, and establish business targets, all of which compromises the ethic of individuality espoused in the Bar.
Although the fusion of barristers and solicitors is unlikely to happen, the introduction of Legal Disciplinary Partnerships in 2009 has opened up the organization possibility for the conjoining of the two. And when alternative business structures make themselves known, many conventional arrangements might begin to fail. Alternative business structures will seriously affect numbers and structures within the legal profession and increase the employed section of the legal profession. We suggested that up to a thousand law firms could fail in competition with supermarkets and other legal service providers. Barristers too will be affected.
With these eventualities direct access work grants the possibility of holding onto traditional values and procedures. Prest (1986) is clear that the settling of the referral structure of the Bar did not come into being until the 19th century, so that an earlier paradigm of professionalism for the Bar encompassed direct relations with clients. Attorneys and solicitors stepped in when geography made it difficult for clients. Direct access recaptures these pre-modern ideals of working. But perhaps of more significance is that barristers can situate themselves more centrally in the market through doing direct access work. Their potential for control over their work and professional relationships is enhanced.
Thursday, 4 June 2009
Lawyer-Client Relationships
I have just posted on SSRN the final revised version of my paper on lawyer-client relationships. It is "Ambiguous Allegiances in the Lawyer-Client Relationship: The Case of Bankers and Lawyers".
The paper deconstructs the prototypical dyadic lawyer-client relationship in the context of corporate transactions. Most lawyer-client analyses view the relationship as a direct unmediated one between the two. I argue this is illusory and that without understanding the context of business transactions, much about the relationship is omitted or missed from analysis.
At a minimum the relationship is triadic. If, for example, a client is borrowing funds from a bank for an investment, even though the client's lawyer's primary duty is to the client, the lawyer always has an eye on the future business that might come from the bank. The lawyer's allegiances are pulled more ways than one.
For example, Jonathan Knee in The Accidental Investment Banker: Inside the Decade That Transformed Wall Street (2006), wrote of one deal:
This episode highlights an important and inherent conflict between banker and client in sales processes. After a successful transaction, the client disappears and any future business will come from the universe of suitors. This creates a sometime irrestible incentive to provide, or give the appearance of providing, some form of subtle preferential treatment to those most likely to offer something in return at a later date.The paper uses a mix of interview data, ethnography, and documentary sources. I would appreciate any comments and feedback.
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