There has been noticeable ambition for greater transparency in the legal services market over the past two years, largely driven by the findings of the Competition and Markets Authority’s legal services market study, which were published in December 2016. Regulators have made changes to their rules regarding the information that should be provided on law firms’ websites, and the Legal Services Board is looking into ways that they can make their work more accessible to the profession and the wider public.

At the Legal Ombudsman, we want to be more transparent about both the way we work and how we resolve the complaints we investigate. Doing this could have a range of benefits for both consumers and the legal sector. It is information which would be made readily available for consumers who wish to find out more about their service provider in the first instance. More information about our decisions would help both consumers and legal service providers to understand how we make decisions, and more generally a wider range of information can provide the impetus for individuals and the sector to improve customer service and complaints handling standards.

As a member of the Ombudsman Association, we always seek to follow the principles of good complaint handling – one of which is openness. We want to increase our accountability and ‘demystify’ the service we provide, because in our experience, consumer understanding of how ombudsman schemes work is not especially high. The legal services market can also be intimidating and confusing, even for those who have used it a number of times before. We are here to build confidence in legal services, and being transparent in our own work is a crucial foundation for this.

In 2018, we commissioned joint research with the SRA, on ‘Better Information’. This work highlighted that while people find our existing ombudsman decision data useful, it could be improved to be more informative. You can read the findings in more detail in the full report on our website.

We are keen to drive this work forward and have published a discussion paper to gather wider thoughts on potential ways forward. We are keen to hear from all stakeholders – from press, to regulators, to consumers – but especially from members of the profession.

The discussion paper sets out a range of ways we could share more information: from additional data about our decisions through to the suggestion that we could publish full ombudsman decisions. Please do give us your thoughts on the ideas we are putting forward and let us know if there are other approaches we haven’t mentioned. We are keen to find a way that works for everyone, ensuring fairness to providers while not sacrificing the usefulness of the data and insights we gather.

You can read the full discussion paper and find out how to respond here. Responses should be sent to us by 31 January 2020.