Letter: The season for a rant

The Journal was kind enough to publish (June 2011, 6) a bit of a rant from me in connection with the Scottish Legal Complaints Commission and the madness of our subsidising that organisation to harass and investigate us as a profession.

I should say that in the weeks following the publication of that letter I received a number of phone calls and correspondence from other solicitors absolutely in agreement with the views that I had expressed.

I am afraid (and perhaps this is to be an annual occurrence) that I feel another rant coming on. Am I the only person who has been underwhelmed by the SLCC’s survey of the profession carried out by telephone?

In my case this survey, promised to last for about seven minutes, probably took twice that time as the diction of the caller was incomprehensible and he had to be asked to repeat almost every question.

What was the point of these questions? Who benefits from my guess as to how many conveyancing transactions my firm carried out between October 2009 and September 2010?

The one question they might have asked, but did not of course, is what benefit we think the SLCC brings to the profession and to our clients?

And we are paying to subsidise this organisation, and its pointless survey.