Solicitors are required to do quite a lot of things that they wouldn’t necessarily do if left to their own devices. This is fair enough, given that the profession is still regarded as an honourable one, for which the public are entitled to expect the highest code of integrity and trust. Indeed all solicitors are “Solicitors of the Supreme Court”. Ultimately they are properly described as Officers of the Court), owing a high duty of care to Justice as a principle and a system, as well as a service. Therefore a few metaphorical eyebrows were raised when “legal services providers” commissioned a report into so-called “client care letters”. These are the mandatory initial letters, which must contain certain information, prescribed by the Solicitors’ Regulation Authority (the SRA). All solicitors know that they have to send their clients such letters, when they are initially instructed, and by and large, all solicitors do send out such letters. Almost inevitably however, such letters are weighty tomes that are skim-read, rather than properly read by clients. The report tells us what we all knew already – client care letters are not easy to read! The advice from the report amounts to little more than the “KISS” principle – Keep It Simple Stupid! The phrase that comes to mind is “easier said than done”.
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