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Law firms are overwhelmingly failing to follow up referrals for basic legal work from comparison websites, in what is described today as a “massive own goal by the profession”. In a mystery shopping exercise, eight out of ten online referral requests for a simple will were ignored.

Our latest news round-up takes in an innovative partnership to combine financial, taxation and legal advice, an update on ABS applications, the role for ABSs in the conveyancing market, growing fraud claims against solicitors, support for provisional assessment, and new blood at the OLC.

The long-running saga over standard contractual terms between barristers and solicitors has hit another hurdle after the Legal Services Board issued a statutory warning notice that it is considering whether to reject changes to the cab-rank rule that would underpin them.

The Law Society, in my experience, is rather good at making things complicated. For evidence, look no further than the new internal governance arrangements which received lukewarm support from the Legal Services Board shortly before Christmas. This may seem like a dry and esoteric issue to most. Virtually everyone, in fact, which is why pretty much nobody else seems to write about or comment on it. They are wrong.

It is not necessary to use a legally qualified professional to prepare a will, the British Bankers Association has insisted. It said a bank’s in-house unit “produces just as satisfactory a service as a firm of solicitors regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority”.