Client care

There is a wide range of practice areas where solicitors can offer unbundled legal services, from actions against the police to civil litigation, the Law Society has suggested. It said firms could also use paralegals to act as McKenzie Friends in court.

Conveyancers have usurped family lawyers as the main cause of complaints to the Legal Ombudsman, its annual report has revealed. But it also urged lawyers to think twice before pushing for formal decisions rather than accepting informal resolutions to complaints.

There is considerable unhappiness among home buyers and sellers with conveyancers and the speed of the moving process, new research has found. More than 40% of consumers were unsure or unlikely to offer them repeat business.

Large corporate clients are demanding “far more” fixed fee and ‘menu’ pricing, but are having to push firms into providing it, a survey based on interviews with 40 in-house teams and 50 top 100 law firms has found.

London firm Hodge Jones & Allen has launched a fixed-fee arbitration service for divorcing couples in the wake of judicial support for such a move to keep costs down. The firm is encouraging more law firms to get on board.

Client, consumer or customer – no single label can describe the relationship that now exists between people and their legal services providers, Professor Stephen Mayson has argued – having previously thought that it was a distinction without a difference.

City law firm Berwin Leighton Paisner has launched Streamline, a “process improvement service” designed to cope with the legal challenges of big construction projects and complex or high-volume commercial litigation.

A law firm has won an injunction against a former client who set up websites about the firm with its name in the URL, after the High Court deemed his actions to be harassment. The injunction also covered Rick Kordowski, who ran the infamous SolicitorsFromHell.co.uk website.

Solicitors must not exploit clients’ lack of knowledge about wills for their own advantage, the SRA has warned. In a newly issued guidance note, the regulator said clients should not be led to believe that appointing a solicitor as executor was “essential or indeed the norm”.

Law firms are starting to see the opportunities in small claims after Liverpool firm Morecrofts launched a flat-fee service, allied with unbundled pieces of advice, to aid potential claimants.

QualitySolicitors has teamed up with a mediation provider to offer a fixed-fee legal solution for the type of small claims disputes that it said most “shortsighted” law firms will not touch. It said law firms were missing out on potential clients of the future.

The fears of litigants about the high cost of legal representation were borne out by their experience, government-commissioned research has found.

A barrister has failed in his judicial review of a decision of the Legal Ombudsman (LeO) that he did not deal with a complaint properly. LeO has welcomed the ruling for setting the bar high when challenging its decisions.

The Legal Ombudsman today appealed to solicitors’ bottom line to persuade them to take complaints more seriously, saying that law firms and other providers could increase their profits by up to 3% if they do.

The Legal Ombudsman (LeO) has fought off the first judicial review to reach court, brought by a former solicitor unhappy that it had ordered his bill to be slashed. The case, involving a CFA, comes as LeO issues a report outlining problems caused by ‘no win, no fee’ deals.