Journal :: Does your solicitor speak English?

Published: August 9, 2004
Author: Paul Cadde
Category: Marketing
Permalink: Does your solicitor speak English?

If you are a solicitor, then surely you must be of above average intelligence! And, given the importance of the choice of exactly the right words in a legal document, you must have a better than average command of English. Right? Read on ?..

The Law Society has a mark of excellence for its members which it calls, imaginatively enough, Lexcel. All solicitors must comply with the various regulations that relate to their profession, just as we must comply with ours. They have to follow the Solicitors Practice Rules, Solicitors Account rules, Investment Business Rules, and the Law Society?s Guide to the Professional Conduct of Solicitors. But those who wish to be regarded as the ?best of the best? aspire to the ?Lexcel? mark of excellence.

For those solicitors who believe they should qualify for this mark of excellence, the Law Society has produced a statement of the standards to which they must aspire. It makes quite interesting reading. You can find this on the Law Society website at http://www.lawsociety.org.uk//documents/downloads/Practice%20Management%20Standards.pdf. What amused me in perusing this document was the assumptions the Law Society made about just how well their elite of the elite might understand ordinary English. Here is a paragraph from the first page of the document:

?In order to achieve Lexcel:

• practices must comply with all the core Practice Management Standards which are indicated by the words ?will? and ?must? and the use of bold type


• while ?should? indicates a recommendation


• and the word ?may? conveys discretion?

If the Law Society is uncertain that their elite of the elite will understand the meaning of words like ?must? and ?should? and ?may?, I wonder what their opinion is of the standard of English of their remaining members!

Leading on from this, during a recent search of the Law Society online database of solicitors specialising in Tax Law, I discovered 2,597 names. But when I then put in the qualification that they should be able to speak English, only two firms appeared to fit ? one in Bournemouth and one in London. I wonder what language the other 2,595 speak?

Perhaps, though, the moral from this is not that very few solicitors speak English, but that you need to be very careful when designing online databases. In fact, you need to be very careful with your website design in general. If you have a website, approach your design and modification of that site with at least as much care and attention as you would give to your brochure and any other marketing material you may use. And if you do not have a website, recognise you may be losing vast amounts of business without realising ? not so much the business that the site could generate itself, but the business that is lost when potential clients realise you do not have an online presence.

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