LETTERS Low-down lawyers
Sir: Whilst Auberon Waugh may or may not be justified in referring to Lord Hail- sham's time on the Woolsack as 'the Brezhnev years' (Another voice, 22 April), I believe Noel Malcolm was a little unjust in chiding him for pointing out that 'solici- tors and barristers . . . are not like the grocer's shop at the corner of the street in a town like Grantham' (Politics, 15 April).
I have little occasion to shop in Gran- tham, but I do make frequent use of a local, family-run health food shop. If, as a benchmark, I were to accord that shop ten out of ten for factors such as speed of service, concern for the customer, general efficiency etc, of the half dozen lawyers (none from Harpenden) I have observed at close quarters in recent years, only one would secure from me anything like a respectable score on the same scale. In most cases I would consider scores be- tween one and four to be generous, and in one instance only a negative rating would suffice.
Given this almost universal inability to achieve the shopkeeper's standard, my experience suggests that the noble Lord was entirely justified in pointing out the obvious difference between his profession and more responsive trades.
One explanation lies in a characteristic that lawyers share with builders, viz new clients are usually quite heavily involved before the professional's shortcomings be- come apparent. I doubt that even Lord Hailsham would confidently set about rid- ding the world of cowboy builders; but with the legal profession the position would be very much ameliorated if the Law Society and/or the Solicitors Complaints Bureau could be prevailed upon to publish an annual public reference document giv- ing salient details of all complaints upheld during the preceding five years, including the names of the individual lawyers and firms against whom the complaints were made.
M. J. C. Waller
56 Tennyson Road, Harpenden, Herts
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