The difference between life and death

Ever since the Legal Services Act heralded the arrival of so called '¨'Tesco Law', many commentators have been writing the obituary of the high street solicitor.

The assumption is that smaller solicitors' practices will be swept away by the tsunami of large new entrants to the legal market place or possibly by the smaller tidal wave of national franchises and groups of solicitors. So are we really looking at the end of high street solicitors?

The general view seems to be that the public will flock to both of these new entrants because they will offer the public legal services which are cheaper, better, easier to access and all under a familiar banner. But is it really that simple?

Firstly, will big name brands really want to offer legal services which are considerably cheaper than those now available? Some of these businesses will be used to very high margins which they might struggle to match in the highly competitive legal arena. Indeed it can be seen already that new entrants are not going to dramatically devalue the cost of legal services with Co-operative Legal Services, for example, offering wills starting from £125 including VAT which might be competitive but is not dramatically cheaper than a lot of high street firms.

In any event, most of the focus of new entrants appears to be on the personal injury market which is still being run largely on a "no win no fee" basis. In this situation price is not that relevant to the consumer.

Faceless

So if it is not cheaper, will the service be better? There is no evidence that the sort of large organisations who will enter the market place can claim to provide a better quality of service, indeed anecdotal evidence would suggest the opposite. How many of us have battled through telephone answering systems being told to select a number for this or that only to be frustrated by the end result, or deal with call centres full of faceless individuals? How many of us speak glowingly about our encounters with our insurers and our banks? And yet this is how many big businesses operate and these are the very organisations who will be offering legal services. Clearly, this is where the high street solicitor can have an advantage.

Certainly the services of new entrants can, and probably will, be standardised but uniformity is not necessarily an attractive feature of legal advice. Consumers of legal services, or clients as we used to call them, want advice that is relevant and easy to understand. But it may be too simple to suggest that the best way to obtain such advice is face to face with a familiar solicitor.

Big reputations

There are other risks associated with being a new entrant which should give '¨the beleaguered high street solicitor '¨some comfort.

Big names come with big reputations, and those reputations are not always good. There will always be those who take comfort from a well known brand but there will also be others who are already turned off a particular brand. If, when you last moved house, your broadband supplier managed to leave you without a supply for four weeks due to some vague technical issue are you really going to trust them to deal with your personal injury claim?

The same could be true of national groups of solicitors. Lawyers are only ever as good as the last case they handled but when they are part of a large organisation they are likely to be measured by the standard of work undertaken by anybody operating under the same banner. In fact it goes further than just the quality of the work, if a particular organisation previously acted for your former spouse in an acrimonious divorce would you instruct another part of that organisation to carry out any legal work on your behalf at all?

Benefits for all

Some of the new entrants are likely to have the sort of marketing budgets that even large legal practices can only imagine however. As has been seen in other industries this can serve to raise demand for the service in general, not just for the particular supplier. For example a national campaign to promote will writing by a leading supermarket would generate new business for them but it would also generate enquiries about wills for all solicitors. So the new legal environment might just have some benefits for all.

Of course size also matters. As anybody who has tried to make changes in a large organisation knows, change can be a slow and difficult process however smaller practices should have the advantage of '¨being able to adapt more quickly to meet new demands and to deal with emerging areas of law.

High Street solicitors are far from finished, provided that they continue to offer clients a sensibly priced, easily accessible and bespoke service. However they also need to ensure that they differentiate themselves from the new entrants by promoting the fact that they do not operate from a call centre, have good local knowledge and that their clients might not have to "press three to speak to an advisor".