“Shameful Practices”

In my last blog, I talked about how the legal profession has failed to provide the competitive, open and high quality services required under the Legal Services Act in any substantive way in the five years since it was published. The fact is that they have patently failed to provide any of these.

I said that access to the protections of the British legal system and to advice on how to use it is our right as both individuals and businesses. I felt that the Law Society and the profession as a whole had been poor custodians of these safeguards and had deliberately made such access difficult and expensive for their own advantage.

Since I wrote this I have seen further examples of these activities, not least of which was an article in the Mail on line where Irwin Mitchell had angered a Judge with their fees of £74,000 to win compensation of less than £13,000 for an injured plumber.

When Irwin Mitchell were criticised, they thought that the most appropriate response was to reduce the success premium charged from ‘double-bubble’ uplift down to a mere 60% on top of their full charge out rate of up to £250 per hour!

I then read a legal services board report stating that they had evidence that more than 15% of law firms charge their clients for the time it takes to handle their complaint, and worse than this, that fewer than 1 firm in 10 are obeying the rules requiring them to tell their clients how to complain! Even the Chair of the Legal Services Board’s Consumer Panel called the situation ‘shameful’. This was nearly five years after the introduction of the Legal Services Act, an Act that has made little or no difference to the protection of the customer from what appears to be sharp practice within the profession.

Irony is thick in the air. As I write, the 100 year anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic has just passed. It is worthy of note that it wasn’t just the iceberg that sank the Titanic, it was the arrogance of the ship’s captain and its owners thinking that no matter what obstacles it met, the ship would navigate through safely.

Perhaps there is a message there for the Profession.