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.

As someone who has been immersed in Jackson from the start (in fact, I broke the story that the review was going to happen), there are a couple of points slightly off the usual Legal Futures agenda that I would like to draw out of the announcements yesterday around the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill.

We all know the line about damned lies and statistics, and there has been no shortage of the latter as Legal Services Act survey after Legal Services Act survey is published. Certainly the statistics reported today by the Legal Services Consumer Panel can be interpreted in various ways. Overall, 80% of people were satisfied with the legal service they received. Is that good? It sounds OK to me.

I don’t know much about the financial markets – that’s one of the many reasons I became a solicitor donkey’s years ago. So I don’t quite get how a company like online conveyancing business In-Deed, that with the best will in the world is currently little more than an idea, can float on AIM, have a market capitalisation of £8.6m and within a couple of days see its share price rise a third, from 42p to 56p.

Complaints are a law firm’s best source of market intelligence. I’ve heard this said countless times in recent years, previously by the Legal Complaints Service and its many forebears, and now by the Legal Services Board. “Many lawyers are missing the chance to learn from substantial numbers of consumers who make a complaint,” said LSB chief executive Chris Kenny last week. It may well be true. But hardly any lawyer believes it.