Forget Tesco Law...

If ever a movement was wrongly named then frankly it’s ‘Tesco Law’, the shorthand for the ongoing deregulation of legal services. Tesco has famously shown zero interest in the law, whereas their high street rivals the Co-Op have built a legal division from scratch to almost 450 employees in six years.

Last week Co-operative Legal Services became the first consumer brand officially to be licensed by the Solicitors Regulation Authority. The retailer, together with two high street firms (John Welch and Stammers and Lawbridge Solicitors Ltd), became the first SRA-licensed alternative business structures (ABSs) under the Legal Services Act 2007.

I spoke to Eddie Ryan, managing director of the Co-Operative Legal Services, last week and asked if he expected commentators to adopt a name change. ‘If they continue to call it “Tesco Law”, I’ll be bemused,’ said Ryan. ‘“Co-Op law” should have been adopted some six years ago as soon as we established Co-Operative legal services.’

This is the third in a series of blogs to explore ‘access to justice’ in the context of ABSs and the savage cuts of the Legal Aid, Punishment and Sentencing of Offenders Bill. The Co-op sits at that intersection where liberalization of the legal services market meets the massive retrenchment of the legal aid scheme.

In my first blog, I reported that at the end of last year the Co-Op launched a family law service spearheaded by lawyers from leading London legal aid firm TV Edwards. Jenny Beck, co-chair of the Legal Aid Practitioners Group and former managing partner of TV Edwards, denied her decision was motivated by money. ‘If you were a legal aid lawyer 10 years ago you would have been helping infinitely more people than now,’ she said.

Quite. In fact, the Co-op has long noted the cultural fit between its co-operative values and that of publicly funded law. Four years ago I interviewed Eddie Ryan for the Legal Action Group’s Legal Action journal in an article looking at whether new market entrants under the ABS regime would have any interest in legal aid work. It has to be said that the weren’t prospective ABSs queuing up to discuss their plans to promote access to justice to those people who are traditionally excluded from legal services. But Ryan spoke then about the Co-op ‘wrapping our arms about people who need our help’. ‘Legal services are a distress purchase or a purchase of necessity,’ he said. ‘We are there when people need us or in times of distress.’

The rhetoric sounds great; but what – if anything – can the Co-op offer to clients that is not being offered already? Hopefully, we shall soon see. A key part of the Co-op’s move into legal services will be a low-price, fixed fee tariff for family work. The Legal aid Bill will scrap legal aid for nearly all family cases. That leaves an enormous justice gap.

Earlier this month Sir Nicholas Wall, president of the family division, predicted ‘a substantial increase’ in the numbers of litigants-in-person ending up in the family courts as a result of the government’s proposals. Sir Nicholas drew a distinction between ‘big money’ cases and routine cases. ‘What worries me are the smaller cases where there is no representation, where, for example.... there is a serious imbalance between an impoverished wife and a better off husband,’ he told the family lawyers’ group Resolution annual conference. ‘The difficulty is compounded if neither side receives sensible advice.’

On the government’s own figures there were 53,800 cases last year where people received representation before the courts under the legal aid scheme – plus a further 211,000 family cases where people received initial advice and assistance.

‘Legal aid has provided a really important safety net for people over the last 50 years and that safety net is being pulled away,’ Christina Blacklaws, who chairs the Law Society’s legal affairs and policy board, told me. Parties will only be eligible for legal aid if there is evidence of domestic violence. ‘What does that say about our legal aid scheme?’ said Blacklaws. ‘Hopefully we will help to bridge the gap.’

We can expect the Co-operative Legal Services to be heavily promoting low-price, fixed fee tariff for divorce work. For all the hype about the marketing clout of solicitor networks such as QualitySolicitors.com, it shouldn’t be overlooked that every week 15 million shoppers walk down the aisles of some 3,000 stores.

Fixed fees in divorce work is a genuinely compelling offer and gives vulnerable clients price certainty at a time of their lives when they need it most. As Blacklaws told me she couldn’t actually afford her own services as a lawyer. ‘No one likes hourly rates,’ she said. ‘We are going to be doing away with that so we can have good value, quality, fixed-price services and people know exactly what they are going to get.’