The short answer
When the Legal Services Consumer Panel asked consumers directly, the most important factor in choosing a legal services provider was that the provider is regulated, cited by 89%. Reputation followed at 86% and price at 84%. Satisfaction with legal services sits consistently in the mid-eighties, so the picture is not one of widespread dissatisfaction. The weak points are narrower and more specific: information is hard to find before instruction, and a substantial minority of clients do not trust their own firm to handle a complaint properly.
What the consumer research shows
- 89% said it mattered that a provider is regulated, the top factor when choosing
- 86% reputation, 84% price followed as the next most important factors
- 44% of consumers shopped around, up from 28% in 2019
- 21% chose unbundled services, the highest rate the survey has recorded
- 20% would not complain to their provider because they do not trust it to deal with the complaint properly
- Source: Legal Services Consumer Panel tracker survey, 3,750 consumers who used legal services in the previous two years
What do clients actually prioritise?
Regulation, reputation and price, in that order. The Legal Services Consumer Panel’s annual tracker survey put the question directly for the first time in 2025, and being regulated came out ahead of everything else at 89%.
That deserves attention, because it cuts against the way firms usually talk about differentiation. The single strongest signal a client is looking for is one that every SRA-regulated firm already has and most barely mention. Regulated status, the protections that come with it, professional indemnity cover, the compensation fund and access to the Legal Ombudsman are competitive assets, and firms compete instead on adjectives.
Reputation at 86% and price at 84% are close behind, and their proximity matters. A firm cannot win on reputation alone if its pricing is opaque, and cannot win on price if nothing signals quality.
Are clients really shopping around?
More than they used to, but less than the narrative suggests. The proportion of consumers shopping around reached 44%, up from 28% in 2019, and that is a genuine and substantial shift.
It is also not the whole picture. A majority still do not compare providers before instructing, and the trend has not been linear: the figure peaked at 43% in 2022, fell to 39% in 2023, recovered to 41% in 2024 and reached 44% in 2025. The Panel has previously described itself as concerned by the post-pandemic dip.
Behaviour also varies enormously by practice area. Family law and housing problems produce the most comparison. Criminal matters, patents and powers of attorney produce the least, for obvious reasons: urgency, specialism and personal recommendation all suppress shopping around.
The practical implication is that a firm’s marketing strategy should follow its practice mix. A family or conveyancing practice is competing in a genuinely comparative market. A criminal defence practice largely is not, and investment aimed at winning comparison shoppers will underperform there.
What information can clients not find?
Less than they should, given that publishing much of it is a regulatory requirement.
Consumers found it easiest to obtain information about costs, cited by 70%, followed by whether they could complain to an ombudsman, how long the service would take, and details of professional indemnity cover. Seventy per cent finding cost information sounds respectable until you consider that the SRA Transparency Rules require firms offering certain services to individuals to publish price information prominently on their websites.
The regulator does enforce this. The SRA has taken enforcement action against firms that failed to comply with the Transparency Rules, including official warnings and fixed penalties. A firm without compliant pricing on its site has both a compliance exposure and a commercial one, since price is the third most important factor to the people it is trying to reach.
The Panel has also tracked declines in how easily consumers can find service descriptions, staff information and indicative timelines, and has raised the state of transparency in the sector with the Competition and Markets Authority.
The trust gap in complaints handling
This is the most uncomfortable finding in the research, and the one firms can act on fastest.
When the Panel asked dissatisfied consumers why they would not complain to their provider, the answers were not about apathy. More than a quarter, 27%, said they would prefer a third party to complain for them. A quarter, 25%, said they were concerned about how the provider would react. One in five, 20%, said they would not trust the provider to deal with the complaint properly.
Read those together and a pattern emerges. A significant minority of dissatisfied clients believe that raising a concern with their own solicitor is either futile or risky. That is a reputational problem for the profession and an operational one for individual firms, because a complaint that is never made is a complaint that cannot be resolved cheaply.
It also has a direct cost. Demand on the Legal Ombudsman has risen sharply, with the Office for Legal Complaints expecting 17,675 new complaints in 2026-27, 174% above 2019-20 levels. Firms that resolve matters well at first tier avoid both the case fee and the published outcome, and our guide to Legal Ombudsman complaints sets out what good first-tier handling actually requires.
Is client satisfaction actually falling?
No, and this is where a good deal of commentary goes wrong.
Satisfaction with legal services has been consistently high in the tracker survey, in the mid-eighties across recent years and higher for some service types, with satisfaction with outcomes higher still. It has risen over the life of the survey rather than fallen.
That matters because it changes the diagnosis. The profession does not have a general service quality crisis. It has specific, identifiable weaknesses at particular points: the information available before instruction, and the handling of things when they go wrong. Those are narrower problems and considerably more fixable than a wholesale reinvention of client service.
A firm reading dire warnings about collapsing client trust and responding with a rebrand is solving a problem it does not have, while leaving its pricing page and its complaints procedure untouched.
What is unbundling, and why does it matter?
Unbundled services, where a client instructs a lawyer for defined parts of a matter and handles the rest themselves, reached 21% of consumers in the 2025 tracker, the highest rate recorded and up three percentage points year on year.
The trend is significant because it reflects clients making a considered decision about where legal input is worth paying for, rather than either instructing fully or not at all. It sits alongside the growth of fixed-fee arrangements, which the Panel has tracked rising substantially over the life of the survey.
For firms, unbundling raises real questions about scope, retainer drafting and risk. A limited retainer needs to be limited in writing, and the boundaries need to be clear to a client who may not appreciate what falls outside them. Handled properly it opens a market that would otherwise go unserved; handled loosely it is a negligence exposure.
Where does digital fit?
It matters, but as an enabler of the three things clients actually prioritise rather than as a priority in itself.
Online delivery of legal services has grown steadily across the life of the tracker survey, and consumer satisfaction with online delivery has been positive rather than grudging. Clients are comfortable with digital service. That is settled.
The useful question is what a firm’s digital presence is doing. If it publishes compliant, clear pricing, it is serving the 84% who care about price. If it makes regulated status, indemnity cover and the ombudsman route visible, it is serving the 89% who care most about regulation. If it carries genuine reviews, it is serving the 86% who care about reputation.
A site optimised for visibility that does none of those things is answering a question clients did not ask. Search visibility determines whether a firm is found; the content of the site determines whether being found converts into an instruction. The regulatory constraints on all of this are covered in our guide to law firm marketing and the SRA rules.
What should a firm actually change?
Five things, ordered by the ratio of effect to effort.
- Make regulated status visible. SRA number, indemnity cover, the compensation fund and the ombudsman route belong somewhere a prospective client will see them, not buried in a legal notices page. This is the top-cited factor and it costs nothing to surface.
- Audit your pricing page against the Transparency Rules. It is a regulatory requirement and it addresses the third most important factor. Firms that have added services without revisiting the page tend to drift out of compliance quietly.
- Fix first-tier complaints handling. A fifth of dissatisfied clients do not trust you to deal with a complaint. Make the route obvious, respond properly, and treat the response letter as the document that decides whether the matter escalates.
- Publish timelines and service descriptions. Consumers report these as harder to find than costs, and they are cheap to produce and rarely contentious.
- Match effort to practice mix. Comparison-heavy areas such as family and conveyancing justify investment in being compared. Criminal and specialist work does not, and the same budget is better spent on referral relationships.
Frequently asked questions
What do clients look for most when choosing a law firm?
That the provider is regulated. When the Legal Services Consumer Panel asked directly, 89% of consumers cited regulated status as important, ahead of reputation at 86% and price at 84%.
How many clients shop around for legal services?
44% in the most recent tracker survey, up from 28% in 2019. The figure has moved unevenly rather than steadily, and comparison is far more common in family law, housing and conveyancing than in criminal work or powers of attorney.
Are clients satisfied with UK legal services?
Broadly yes. Satisfaction has been consistently in the mid-eighties across recent tracker surveys, with satisfaction with outcomes higher still, and has risen over the life of the survey rather than fallen.
Why do clients not complain to their solicitor?
Trust and apprehension rather than indifference. 27% would prefer a third party to complain on their behalf, 25% are concerned about how the provider would react, and 20% do not trust the provider to handle the complaint properly.
Do law firms have to publish their prices?
Firms offering certain services to individuals, including residential conveyancing, are required by the SRA Transparency Rules to publish price information prominently on their websites. The SRA has taken enforcement action against firms that do not comply.
What are unbundled legal services?
An arrangement where a client instructs a lawyer for defined parts of a matter and handles the remainder themselves. Take-up reached 21% of consumers in the most recent tracker, the highest rate recorded.
The practical takeaway
The evidence does not support the idea that clients have fundamentally changed and firms must reinvent themselves. Satisfaction is high and has been rising. What the data identifies is narrower and more actionable: clients cannot easily find information they are entitled to, and a significant minority do not trust the complaints process they are offered.
Both are fixable with existing resources, and the first one is already a regulatory obligation. The firms that gain will be the ones that make the boring things visible, rather than the ones that spend the year on a brand refresh.