Quality Indicators in Legal Services

More people are shopping around for legal services these days. Online information that can help the public compare the quality of providers is an important driver for this.

Between 2021 and 2022, the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA), the Council for Licensed Conveyancers (CLC), and CILEx Regulation worked together to undertake a pilot. We wanted to test approaches that legal service regulators might consider in the future to ensure the availability and accessibility of comparable information continues to increase.

Nine review websites and comparison websites took part in the pilot, alongside 70 law firms, completing actions and providing their views and feedback to us as we went along.

More than 6,000 members of the public participated in the pilot’s consumer research projects. We also worked with other organisations, professional bodies, and website providers to capture their perspectives.

We learned a lot. We saw enthusiasm and strong levels of interest from consumers in a number of legal service quality indicators, including online reviews and star ratings in particular. Consumers were interested in legal service comparison websites, and ways to find out more about them.

Review websites reported increased numbers of legal service providers and consumers engaging with their platforms. This was supported by targeted work from regulators helping to build that engagement.

We explored barriers that currently inhibit trusted sources of information about legal services from being accessed more widely as a quality indicator by the public. This included data such as Legal Ombudsman decisions.

We also heard about significant benefits that some legal service providers are experiencing from quality indicators, alongside concerns about risks raised by other providers.

We have evaluated the evidence we gathered to consider actions that legal service regulators might take going forwards to positively influence quality indicators and their accessibility to consumers. We are pleased to present our findings in this report.

We also set out seven high-level actions that will be a trigger for legal service regulators, whether working individually or collectively, to continue making progress, and securing good conditions for quality indicators in the legal services market.

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