Somewhere in All of This, There Is a Client

You chose the firm. Everyone else on your case was chosen for you — and you are paying for all of them.

Something has gone wrong and you need a solicitor.

Maybe a friend gives you a name. Maybe your broker does, or your insurer, or a company that rang you about a claim you half remember making. You have a conversation. You are told an hourly rate, or a percentage, or that it will not cost you anything unless you win. But there is no such thing as no win no fee , rather it is if we do win we ask if we can have some money and if you lose you pay need to pay something and even us. It does happen.

And then you say yes.

And have you actually seen any paperwork?

Consider what you have just agreed to, because it is a good deal more than it looks.

You have chosen a firm, with no means of knowing whether it is the right one. You have accepted a retainer whose terms will govern every bill that follows, and which you have almost certainly not read to the end. You have handed over the choice of barrister. The choice of expert. Quite possibly the choice of who funds the case, and who insures you against losing it.

Every one of those decisions will affect what this costs you. Not one of them is yours to make. And you have no way of assessing any of them.

So what are you supposed to do? Go to a second law firm and ask them to check the first one’s retainer? Ask them whether the barrister is the right barrister, whether the expert is the right expert, whether the insurer will actually pay out when it matters?

Nobody does that. Or very few, it is a blind faith in the solicitor.

And because when the advert says it is your compensation, and that it will not cost you a penny, why would you go looking for a second opinion at all?

The regulator went and looked

A year ago, the Solicitors Regulation Authority published a review of the high-volume consumer claims market. Not a survey of opinions. They went into twenty-five firms, sat down, and read fifty client files.

Twelve of the twenty-five firms gave their clients complete information about costs and funding. Twelve out of twenty-five.

On thirty-four of the fifty files there was evidence the client had been advised on the merits of their own claim at the outset. On the other sixteen, there was not.

Some firms had not told clients that they could have pursued the claim themselves, for nothing.

On twelve files, the client was never told that the person who referred them had a financial interest in referring them.

Nine of the twenty-five firms are now under formal investigation.

That is one part of the market — claims run at volume, the sort that arrive by text message about a finance agreement you took out years ago. It is not every firm and I am not suggesting for a moment that it is. But between them, the firms in that review were running something in the order of two and a half million live claims. For a great many people in this country, that is what buying legal services actually looks like.

And the amounts of work in progress sitting behind those claims are staggering.

“Sophisticated clients are fine”

The usual answer is that this is a consumer problem. Businesses know what they are doing. In-house teams know what they are doing. The market sorts itself out at the top.

In my view that is comfortable, and largely wrong.

Sophistication helps. It does not solve it. A sophisticated buyer can still find the whole thing a minefield — not because they are incapable of understanding it, but because the information needed to judge it was never put in front of them in a shape that allowed judgment. And when a matter goes badly, recollections vary. On both sides, to borrow a phrase.

There is a tidier piece of evidence than anybody’s experience. Firms have been required to publish their prices since 2018. When the SRA went back to see how that was working, the obstacle it found was not secrecy. It was that every firm presents its prices differently, so nothing can be compared with anything. Around two in five of the people who had tried said that was precisely what defeated them.

Now, those published prices are not always comparing like with like. I accept that. But they are at least some guidance. And no one publishes litigation pricing yet save where it is within possibly a fixed fee band. Just vague references to hourly rates.

Eight years of compulsory transparency, and the reason you cannot compare two solicitors is not that the numbers are hidden. It is that they are not the same shape.

What is actually missing

More disclosure will not fix this. I would argue the last eight years have already demonstrated that. You can hand somebody a rate card and twelve pages of terms and leave them no better informed than when they started — arguably worse, because now they have been told, and any confusion is their own fault.

What is missing is a scope.

Not an estimate. Not a range. A document that says: this is what your case involves, these are the stages, in this order, this is what each stage is expected to cost, this is who will be doing it, and these are the things that would change the answer.

That is not an exotic request. If you had an extension built you would not accept “we charge sixty pounds an hour and we will see how we go.” You would want a plan, a price against the plan, and an honest account of what happens if they find something behind the wall. You would not regard that as an imposition on the builder. You would regard it as the minimum evidence that they had thought about the job before starting it.

In my view the front end of a legal matter — the part where the work is defined, before anybody is on the record anywhere — is where the cost of that matter is genuinely decided. And it is the least documented part of the entire process.

More often than not the urge is to open a file, not to ask what the client’s best outcome actually is. It is let’s get the meter running.

What that is worth

Everything downstream flows from decisions taken before anyone looks at cost at all. The retainer is settled first, and it caps everything that follows it. The budget, where there is one, comes later, and tends to be built to be filed rather than to be used. By the time anybody is examining the numbers properly, the numbers have already happened.

Somebody has to own that chain from end to end. At the moment, in most matters, nobody does.

That is something worth considering.