The Competition and Markets Authority has launched a market study into legal services in England and Wales, including conveyancing.
The CMA is to examine long-standing concerns about affordability and standards of service.
The study will focus on three key issues:
- whether customers can drive effective competition by making informed purchasing decisions
- whether customers are adequately protected from potential harm or can obtain satisfactory redress if legal services go wrong
- how regulation and the regulatory framework impact on competition for the supply of legal services
CMA senior director Rachel Merelie said: “We would be concerned if customers are not getting a good deal, either because they do not know what to expect when purchasing a legal service, or because they are not seeking appropriate legal support in the first place.
“Not being equipped with the necessary knowledge stops customers exercising choice and prevents competition working effectively.
“We want to see if some customers end up paying more than they expected or receive a poor service. We also think there may be questions over the redress available if this does happen.
“As well as carrying out our own research, we want to hear from all those involved about the issues they experience in using legal services and, in due course, how to tackle any problems we might identify.”
Around one in ten users of legal services in England and Wales have said that they received poor value for money, while among small businesses, only 13% said they viewed lawyers as cost-effective.
Criminal law services will be excluded from the CMA study, which will include areas such as legal disputes, probate and litigation as well as conveyancing.
The CMA could escalate its study into a second phase of more in-depth investigation. Its study comes six weeks after a government announcement that it will launch a consultation by this spring on removing barriers to entry for alternative business models in legal services, and on making legal service regulators independent of their representative bodies.
The Government said at the time: “This will create a fairer, more balanced regulatory regime for England and Wales that encourages competition, making it easier for businesses such as supermarkets and estate agents among others, to offer legal services like conveyancing, probate and litigation.”
The CMA is inviting views, by no later than 5pm on February 3.
These can be emailed to: legal.services@cma.gsi.gov.uk
I’d rather they took a good look at how competition within the property portal market operates
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Agreed and not just portals, some corporates have been getting away with murder for years. I had a meeting back in the early 1990’s with the OFT who then were seriously concerned over so called in-house conveyancing and special discounts as a bribe to use a particular agent.
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Query valid email address for the CMA in article above? May be me? – but my email to them was returned undelivered.
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Ooops, apologies – my error. I’d copied the “mail to” section at front, in error. Please ignore my msg.above.
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