Improbable golden goose

Now that traditional methods of referring work to solicitors such as Yellow Pages seem to be in decline there is a huge growth in websites and internet-based work generation sites.

Hardly a day goes by without one of these organisations contacting me either on the telephone (amusingly) or more often than not on the internet. Their mantra is generally the same: we are a site which will collect hundreds of wonderful clients and in return for a small fee we will refer these wonderful clients on to you. Generally this small fee runs into thousands of pounds and is payable up front.

Work from old clients

I have always been suspicious of this way of doing business. Call me a Luddite but having been in business for over 30 years, I prefer to get work from old clients, colleagues in the profession and recognised referral agencies. I remember with a degree of smugness how

I repeatedly rejected the advances of various personal injury referral organisations despite the fact that everybody said I was mad to do so.

Nevertheless the decision to decline to sup with the devil was well made and when those various organisations collapsed and the inevitable litigation started up it was nice to know that I had nothing to do with it.

These days however there are a wealth of sites offering to be the goose that provides the golden eggs. Generally they work on the basis that they can get good sites high up the list on Google or advertise in major publications and as a result attract (or so they say) thousands of 'leads' or 'new enquiries'.

Recently I signed up for one of these organisations in a weak moment of optimism. It sounded so easy. I part with a few thousand pounds and thereafter I will receive dozens of new clients every day. So far, so simple. In fact what was happening was that:

 I had to fill in a fairly lengthy form each time I received an enquiry;

 clients were ringing me up largely asking for free legal advice and being quite appalled when I suggested they might have to pay when they came to see me; and

 a whopping number of the enquiries seemed to relate to small claims where a new lead was simply using the internet in order to assist himself in relation to the recovery of £500 or less.

The philosophy of these sites is of course badly wrong. When I have a problem I would probably go on the internet to look for a firm of solicitors or perhaps ask a friend who they have used recently.

If I am involved in a messy divorce I am not necessarily going to go to a middle man which is, ostensibly, all these new sites are. I am certainly not going to go to a middleman the veracity of which I know nothing of and more importantly given the availability of internet access these days, which is almost 100 per cent, there seems no reason why anybody would not be able to find a solicitor in their own area without recourse to a middleman.

Cancel subscription next year

Sadly I think these sites like Yellow Pages are likely to die a lingering death in the next few years. I am getting no benefit from the site I am with and will undoubtedly cancel my subscription next year. I suspect a lot of the other sites that other firms have subscribed to will fall by the wayside. With increasing internet access and web sophistication clients are working out for themselves how to contact a solicitor, how to work out who is any good and to drill down into individual firms' specialisations.

While astonishingly quite a small percentage of solicitors still do not have websites, in the next few years this situation is likely to change.

As much free advice as possible

Certainly my advice for anyone thinking about signing up to one of these referral websites is to think very seriously. Not only is there the cost of entering into the arrangement but in my experience there is considerable cost in talking to people on the telephone who have no intention of

paying you any reasonable fees and whose main intention is simply to get as much free advice as is reasonably and legitimately possible.

The trouble is that if you talk to three or four wasters each day, it takes up an awful lot of chargeable time. Geese never did lay golden eggs and I guess they never will.