Should customers be king in the post-LSA legal landscape, asks Jon Robins
Straight-talking legal ombudsman Adam Sampson reopened a can of worms earlier this month by challenging lawyers who insist their “clients” aren’t “customers”. The head of the Office for Legal Complaints is a repeat offender on this point. When he took on the post back in 2009, he talked of a new service “to resolve disputes between lawyers and their customers”.
He was “plainly wrong”, complained Marcel Berlins at the time. The term “customer” applied to someone who bought goods or non-professional services (from say, a plumber) but didn’t apply to seekers of professional services. “I fear it’s an attempt to use a more common term in order to play down the perceived elitism of the legal profession,” Berlins reflected.
Sampson insists his choice of words is “a deliberate symbol of the change which our arrival signaled”. He argues that the word “client” harked back to the traditional relationship between lawyers and those they represent (“one of unequal power and status”); whereas the “notion of customer turns this relationship on its head”.
