Many law firms have failed to recognise the importance of client care and how, by taking care of their clients, they will encourage their clients to take care of their firm. Building a loyalty ladder with your clients is more important at this stage than ever before. Why? We should all know the cost of obtaining a new client – it actually costs six times MORE to find a new client than it does to retain an existing one.

The furore over referral fees has come out of nowhere. In the past three weeks, the Sunday Times, the Daily Mail, the Sunday Telegraph and, this week, The Times with the help of Jack Straw, have all climbed into the trade in claims. There has been an increasing focus on the role of insurance companies – referral fees’ most vehement critic – in actually fuelling them, which has certainly put the industry on the spot. The “if we don’t do it, everyone else will” argument put forward by the Association of British Insurers is not exactly an attractive one.

It is often said that the commercial lawyers have less and less in common with their high street counterparts, but as the Financial Times/Managing Partners Forum survey demonstrates, both share the ability to not really understand what their clients want. The problem, it would seem, is that lawyers think they know what their clients want. Or, perhaps, they know what they think their clients should want.

It wasn’t that long ago that you didn’t need a degree to become a solicitor. There are plenty of very eminent solicitors around who joined a law firm after school and did the old five-year articles to qualify. In fact training to be a solicitor started off purely as an apprenticeship in the form of articles of clerkship, with no examinations.

After all the breathless anticipation, we rather got what we were expecting yesterday on legal aid and the Jackson reforms – full steam ahead into the parliamentary process, with the odd tweak of the former (the tweaks of the latter having already been announced in March). I have written before that alternative business structures (ABSs) are the bigger picture of the Jackson reforms, and surely the same goes for legal aid, albeit for different reasons.