Before a firm is listed

Every firm is checked on the Law Society of Scotland register before it joins our panel, and you can check any Scottish solicitor on that public register yourself. We confirm the firm genuinely practises in the area it is listed under rather than simply being willing to accept the work.

What we ask of them

• To attempt first contact within 24 hours during office hours, and sooner where an enquiry is marked urgent.
• To tell us whether an enquiry has been accepted or declined, and broadly why.
• To disclose our arrangement to you when they take you on, and to confirm it in their terms of business.
• Not to approach you again about unrelated services without your agreement.

What we measure, and publish

We record how long each firm takes to make contact, timed from the moment the enquiry is sent. We also ask you separately whether the solicitor actually got in touch, because a single-sided measure is a firm marking its own homework.

Where a firm publishes a success fee or a fixed fee, we show it. Where it does not, we say so and give the date we last checked. We do not estimate figures a firm has not published.

We do not publish response times or firm profiles. A median drawn from three referrals is not the same as one drawn from three hundred, and it would be misleading to display them identically.

What we do not do

• We do not accept payment for a higher position, because we do not rank firms at all.
• The amount we receive is the same across the panel, so we have no financial reason to prefer one firm over another.
• We do not list a firm in a category merely because it is willing to pay for enquiries in it.
• We do not sell exclusivity in a way that would hide a better-suited firm from you.

What gets a firm removed

Repeatedly failing to make contact within the agreed time. Failing to disclose the arrangement to clients. A pattern of complaints reaching us about service. Or ceasing to hold the registration or the practice area under which it was listed.