SRA reforms: for better, for worse?

John Gould, senior partner at Russell-Cooke LLP, takes the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) to task this week in NLJ over its proposals for greater transparency. The SRA’s ‘Better Information, more choice’ reforms would require law firms to publish pricing and protection information on their website. Gould asks, however, if clients really will be better off. He says ‘pricing the permutations of transactions hypothetically on a website may lead to even greater complexity’. Moreover, ‘the more prescriptive the published price information requirement, the stronger the commercial pressure will be to shoe-horn services into product packages and to quote seemingly attractive prices subject to small print and “extras”’.