Editor's blog | Who's afraid of the Co-op?

Naff? Perhaps for some, but it’s also very clever. The extension of the scheme to divorce places the delivery of legal services right on the high street in the way the liberalisation of financial services brought banking and insurance into supermarkets.

At present some of the Co-op’s legal services are outsourced but the mutual has now said it would support the growth of this part of the organisation by creating 3,000 jobs at Co-operative Legal Services, 90 per cent of which will be “actual legal functions”. Of the current 475 CLS staff just over 100 are solicitors and 60 are legal executives. Co-op senior executives would not say how many of the new jobs would be solicitor positions, only that there would probably be a slight growth in “qualified staff”.

This won’t sound like good news for those who believe that solicitors provide a benchmark for competence in professional legal services, that the Co-op’s move will lead to the dominance of paralegals and that the result will be a drop in professional standards across the sector as a whole.

Paralegals suffered from a dubious reputation after some firms started employing them in the kind of roles they would previously have assigned to junior lawyers. The rationale – having tasks performed in the most cost-efficient manner by individuals with the most appropriate skills level – was not really ever in dispute. Concerns focused on supervision when, on the back of the property boom, commoditisation spread through the sector, with firms relying on armies of low-paid juniors to ensure the sort of cheap and quick turnaround lenders demanded.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that nudged by the SRA, law firms have addressed not just the regulatory issues but also the business issues raised. The service provided by paralegals, it seems, has in many cases become as good as if not better than that provided by solicitors. Surreptitiously, paralegals, and the hundreds of firms that employ them, are redrawing the professional services map.

Consumers other than the repeat, sophisticated business clients, have no real means of gauging a lawyer’s competence beyond the badge of, say, ‘solicitor’ or ‘legal executive’. For them competence is perceived in part at least through the filter of the quality of service received: adviser’s availability, ability to communicate in everyday language, price clarity, etc. Research by the LSB’s Consumer Panel has confirmed these were considerations on which consumers based their decisions when choosing a lawyer. These are precisely the values the Co-op is selling: “fixed fee service, value for money, no hidden costs, jargon free, plain English,” says its website.

In regulatory terms legal advisers cannot hold themselves out as solicitors if they are not, but as long as consumers receive the service they pay for – both in terms of competence and professionalism – it doesn’t matter whether they are a solicitor, legal executive or paralegal. The result of the Co-op’s move should be not a drop but a rise in standards, with CLS giving paralegals better credentials. In five years, being a paralegal at the Co-op could be a status would-be lawyers could positively aspire to. Particularly if CLS, as it has also announced, intends to run its own training scheme for those who want to become solicitors.

Openly making a claim to the £10bn market for consumer legal services, CLS managing director Eddie Ryan acknowledged last week that some firms saw his business as “a major threat”. Should solicitors be scared? They’d better be because they will no longer be the sole owners of the definition of ‘quality of service’ on the high street.

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Jean-Yves Gilg is editor of Solicitors Journal

jean-yves.gilg@solicitorsjournal.co.uk