Last updated 12/06/09 11:16
(See also Bills in "Useful Information")
1. Too many people are denied access to civil law by excessive legal fees. The likely cost is an early concern. The solicitors' professional association (The Law Society) sets no recommended minimum hourly rates. Provincial firms now charge between £100 and £150 per hour. City of London rates are between £350 and £400. On top of that, there is usually a mark-up of 50% or more, which means that virtually all solicitors are now charging at least £150.00 per hour for their time.
2. Someone earning a low wage, - the new minimum wage for example - would, at the end of a 40-hour working week, still not have enough to pay for one hour of the "cheapest" solicitor's time. Any lower quotation would probably be for the services of an unqualified clerk.
3. You can pay a lot and get very little in return. Incompetents and rogues are found in every profession and trade but solicitors can make delay and carelessness pay, e.g. writing letters of apology for failing to send documents asked for. Clients are not fully informed of all a solicitor is doing.
4. The fees of solicitors appointed as executors are paid for out of the estate. Some solicitors have been known to take years to administer an estate, (probate), running up legal fees all the while so as a result, the beneficiaries get nothing. The client cannot complain because the client is dead.
5. "Bad" solicitors have an important advantage over other practitioners in that they are in the profession of last resort - the law. A victim of malpractice in any other trade of profession, can go to a lawyer. Solicitors are reluctant to bring their own fellow professionals into disrepute by fighting malpractice by another. Victims of solicitors' incompetence, negligence, dishonesty or malpractice have no separate profession that they can turn to for help. Many clients have discovered to their cost, that there are various ways in which unscrupulous solicitors can make extra fees by acting against the interests of their own clients.
6. Through the Law Society, firstly at the Solicitors Complaints Bureau (SCB) and now at the Office for the Supervision of Solicitors (OSS), solicitors have the privilege of self-regulation. Worse still, solicitors and their appointees control the complaints system and adjudicate complaints against members of their own profession. Many solicitors' clients believe this "self-adjudication" is not really adjudication at all. Those who have been through the process may conclude it is a sham.
7. A victim of one set of solicitors is most reluctant to place his financial survival in the hands of a second similar set. About the he only course open to a complaint other than the courts is the OSS complaints procedure run by a third set. (The OSS has special rules about negligence). The statistics, such as they are, suggest that a complainant can still "win". Over the first forty months of the OSS, covered by the first three "annual" reports, 1788 complainants (just over 2% of the total) received an average of £351.16 compensation for "Inadequate Professional Service" -perhaps just emough to pay for two hours' of a solicitor's time.
8. Solicitors know they have little to fear from the self-regulated complaints-handling system, which is why many are quite keen to persuade difficult clients to go there. A complaints-handling system run as part of self-regulation places complainants at a severe disadvantage:
i) High hourly rates are seen as perfectly acceptable. You could not expect a self-regulated system to reduce fees for colleagues. Clients complaining about solicitors' costs in "non-contentious" matters are put through the Remuneration Certificate process, and these count as "non-complaints" in OSS statistics. Something like 72% of the OSS remuneration certificates result in a reduction of a solicitor's bill but there are no statistics on the average per bill. In all probability the reduction is very small so of little concern or loss to the solicitor.
ii) OSS complaints' investigation tends to be superficial with little or no discussion, (certainly in the early stage leading to a First Instance Decision). As a recent research report on the OSS discovered, "a willing blindness to the quality of casework is accepted as part of the necessity of managing the public performance of the organisation."
iii) Caseworkers tend to tolerate mistakes and missed deadlines made by solicitors and accept without question the accuracy of any documents produced by solicitors as evidence; verification from the clients' documentation is seen as unnecessary. Deadlines missed by complainants are treated far more rigorously, and normally result in rejection of the complaint.
iv) "Bad" solicitors can easily take advantage of OSS superficiality of investigation, lack of verification, apparent bias and finally their "self-adjudication". This allows profit motives to triumph over integrity. It also allows a continuing deterioration in professional standards, which in itself has been a root cause of an ever-increasing number of complaints against solicitors.
Conclusion: Clearly, the existing complaints handling system needs a "motivation transplant". CASIA believes that, to have any chance of working fairly, the investigation and adjudication of complaints against solicitors must be independent and lay-led. That would promote fair treatment of valid complaints and uphold professional standards more effectively than a self-regulated complaints-handling system will ever achieve. It would serve the solicitors' interests by restoring consumer confidence in their profession - so sadly lacking in recent times.
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