When I first qualified in 1974, solicitors were not allowed to advertise. The most you could do was to put up a brass plate adjacent to the door to your office and wait for the punters to roll up. Being a highly respected member of a golf club or active in the Freemasons or a local church was an effective way of being recommended for legal work. However this was a so called ‘professional’ world where the word “commerce” was a bit of an embarrassment.

Fast forward to the 90’s and the world was changing fast. Claims management companies and other intermediaries were beginning to realise that cases were commodities to be traded and sold. No sooner did the motor accident occur than the vultures began to circle, bombarding victims with phone calls about making claims. The insurance companies themselves were at the heart of this new trade as they were generally the first to hear about what had occurred. Estate agents began to get in on the act and referral fees for conveyancing transactions began to be paid.

Law firms realised that either they had to start spending big to generate work or pay referral fees to ensure sufficient volumes of work. The less forward looking lawyers who couldn’t or wouldn’t pay, saw their trade being intercepted by the big boys and complained to politicians and their professional body the Law Society. The Law Society Council had one or two attempts at trying to ban referral fees but it all got very complicated. How were referral fees to be defined? If you undertook marketing or provided services to law firms how could that be a referral fee? Eventually the government got into the act and the oddly named Legal Aid Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act finally banned referral fees for Personal Injury cases in 2012. However that has not prevented the survival of marketing schemes although they are carefully structured to ensure they stay on the right side of the law.

Jackson Lees pays some referral fees (where they are allowed) and has some marketing arrangements which stay on the right side of the law. We have also set up the Jackson Lees Foundation to give 2% of our annual profits to charity and our ethos is to ‘Make a Positive Difference’ in everything we do; but how can we use the payment of referral fees in a good way to make a positive difference? This was a conundrum that we needed to solve.

That was when we had a Eureka moment. Instead to paying a referral fee to a commercial intermediary, why not pay a donation equivalent to a referral fee to a charity of choice of the person or organisation who refers the case to us? Many employers have an employee charity of the year. We could help to beef up the donations to that charity if we undertake legal work on their behalf. This is the link to the leaflet (scroll to the bottom of the page to ‘downloads’) which sets out more fully how the scheme works. Referral arrangements will continue but this scheme will gradually generate more support for our charities.

Here is a scheme which helps charities, makes clients feel good about helping their favourite charity and makes us feel good too whilst increasing the benefit that we can provide to society at large through the many charities which we will support.

The world has moved on a long way from the days when I qualified but the ethos of serving clients and society does not need to be any different. I hope that the "Supporting our Charities Together" scheme begins to redirect resources to where they need to be and makes us all feel good about what we are doing together.