Price transparency v choice - SRA obligations on price publishing

Working life as a debt recovery Solicitor is a rich tapestry of clients whose business threads are every imaginable colour, debtors every imaginable material and chances of success (based on numerous other variables) every imaginable shape and size. That variety I get to enjoy every day is the reason why I do what I do. How then, I ask myself, as I read the SRA guidance (you can read by clicking the link here - https://www.sra.org.uk/solicitors/guidance/ethics-guidance/price-transparency.page ), am I going to maintain client choice (and act in my client’s best interests) to accommodate all sectors and all debt types when I am forced by the SRA to publish my pricing online in December? 

My clients are not numbers to me. They are each unique and I want to be able to treat them as such so I can properly look after them by pricing accordingly. Some of you might say well of course he doesn’t want to publish his figures but there is far more to this than that. How exactly am I going to price for the client who pulls up in a truck with papers strewn in the back and no explanation of its backstory AND at the same time also price for the client who sends me the info as data that plugs straight into my case management system and automatically generates that first letter? I’m normally quite good at this sort of problem but today’s riddle is baffling. If I pick a mean average to simplify things and make my life easy then my really good clients, who do everything they are told for me and make it easy, are going to suffer because the not so good ones will always increase the average cost. Everyone naturally quotes for that worse-case scenario.

So I think a big rethink is seriously required that takes full account of the practical problems. There needs to be an understanding that we are trying to balance a great number of things here. If something is not always going to be linear then it should not be treated as being linear. We need to step back and think carefully about whether publishing low fees, just to win work, will put teams out of business (or ruin good service levels) or alternatively whether high fees will put people off completely and mean people choose not to access justice. These rules will certainly damage net recoveries generally because instead of listening and bending to your needs as my future client you will have no choice but to accept what we think might work. The customer will no longer come first. This is what happens when we start treating services as pure products.

So would anyone like to prep me that 10-dimensional spreadsheet containing all possible variables and prices because I’m really struggling? Any Einsteins amongst us? 


In all seriousness I am really baffled as to why the SRA would do this to the profession for this particular area of the law. In theory it sounds great doesn’t it until you scratch below the surface of this concept and realise it just cannot work in practice. If I were to rip you off the SRA and SDT would strike me off. It is as simple as that. The remedy you need to protect you already exists and you don’t need me to publish my pricing to improve on that unless of course you want to limit your range of options and who really wants that. Clients need the freedom to contract and they need to find the best fit for all their little foibles. If that is taken away then the rich tapestry we currently cater for will have to be viewed through a black and white lens from now on by lawyers and treated like an “off the peg” item rather than a tailor-made one. 

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