Informal Quality Assessment of Legal Services (by Citizens) in Slovenia

In the paper we described different approaches to quality assessment of legal services, which are provided by lawyers, notaries or other legal profession. Citizens have options to make a formal complaint about poorly delivered legal services. Complaint and possible restitution can hardly effect to the past, when damage was already done. In most cases inspection and supervision mechanisms are obtained by bar association, specialized boards or ombudsman. On the other hand, we experienced a lack of informal or so-called market supervision mechanisms, which could protect citizens from potential bad or mediocre legal services. Based on several prior studies and statistical data we found out that formal supervision mechanisms might lack effectiveness. Therefore we proposed criteria of SERQUAL evaluation for legal service quality assessment and development of a publically available web portal for rating legal service providers with strong incentive of social networks. Citizens would be able to evaluate the legal service they were given according to selected criteria and to list, compare and choose legal service providers based on previous evaluations and scores. With such involvement of citizens we could improve quality of legal service provision and protect citizens from potential poor legal service.