Too much consultation, but not enough with clients

At a recent Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) briefing, one official asked me how the body could get more engagement when consulting on policy. It's a question I've been asked before by regulators and representative bodies and I gave the official the same answer: do less consultations – a lot less.

The other answer I could have given would have been to look at the wording of all documents issued and make a drastic effort to turn your words into plain English. Not that I'm singling out the SRA – this excess of convoluted consultation has been symptomatic of Whitehall, local authorities and all manner of quangos and regulators for years.

Until recently this trend had yet to fully take hold of the legal profession but the jostling ahead of the Legal Services Act changed all that. Legal bodies now issue a dizzying number of consultations, in many cases attracting derisory response levels as diminishing returns kick in.

The irony is that the profession has some big issues to debate at the moment. In the case of the SRA, the body was last week attempting to kick off a dialogue over a once-in-a-generation shift towards what it terms outcomes-focused regulation.

The concept is laudable, but engaging the profession will be a challenge given the thicket of jargon the unsuspecting solicitor must first break through. The idea is to focus regulation on activities with the greatest risks to clients and put more emphasis on underlying principles, as opposed to box-ticking compliance. This sort of stuff is easy to talk about but notoriously hard to put in practice, but that doesn't mean it's not worth the effort.

And, for what it's worth, the SRA gives the impression of genuinely attempting to grapple with some of the fundamental shortcomings of the current regime, which bodes well.

But the body needs a better dialogue with the profession, in particular the key constituency that it is failing to reach: the client. While large law firms have the resources to monitor and respond to detailed policy debates, clients do not.

A case in point is the recent debate over liberalisation of conflicts rules, which achieved support from large law firms but initially only received one client response. On a second consultation it became clear that many clients are sceptical.

Personally, I'm agnostic about the proposed reforms but it would have done the profession no favours to introduce such policy reform without a proper debate. The SRA – and other legal bodies – should investigate more informal means to gather client feedback that are less onerous than lengthy written submissions.

After all, with such radical legal services reform on the horizon it would be bizarre for the client to have so little input in shaping this brave new world.

Related event: Legal Week Future of Legal Services Forum