If you have been looking for a solicitor within the UK then there is a good chance you have came across, seen or heard about the website called ‘Solicitors from Hell’.

The site was a ‘name and shame’ site for solicitors that are not very good so it does have some similarity to our site.  There are some big differences though between our site and theirs.

We list all comments both good and bad and we also do not charge any money if a Solicitors wanted to remove a comment or even the business listing on our site.

Solicitors From Hell was never going to be here for the long run, the biggest problem Solicitors from Hell and Solicit A Lawyer have is the fact of proving (or disproving) the comments which are placed on the site.  If a negative review was posted on either sites and backed up with evidence i.e e-mails / copies of letters then the comments can be proven to be real.

However many of the comments are made by people not providing evidence, using real names / address or just simply not wanting their real information online for everyone to see which they causes the problem of being able to prove the comments is not actually false.

For sites like ours to carry on and to offer real independent reviews of solicitors in the UK we will need people to be more honest with reviews, rather than just posting how bad they have been treated or how bad the service was they will need to start posting evidence as well which will further backup the claim made.

We have made a very small change on the lawyer / solicitor information we display on their personal page.  You will notice the addition of a ‘SRA Number’ which is the Solicitors Regulation Authority number.

This number can be used to ask the SRA for information on the Lawyer / Solicitor.  We feel this information is important and the public should be able to view the full details offered by the Solicitors Regulation Authority as they “regulate more than 120,000 solicitors in England and Wales.”

As this feature has just been added as of this moment no Lawyers / Solicitors have had time to update this, however as time goes on you should start to see SRA numbers appearing.

As you may notice we have updated our main site www.solicitalawyer.co.uk over the holidays.

The site has had the template upgraded to hopefully give users a better experience when browsing through the lists of Lawyers and Solicitors.

If you have any comments on how the site now looks and feels please drop us a e-mail or comment as we are trying to improve everything for you, the users.

Ove r the past week or so we have decided to add in some extra pages to further help users to our site.

On the left hand side you should now notice a ‘Top Areas of Law’ section which is broken down into 10 new pages.  These pages contain just Lawyers who have updated there information on our site so show that they are conveyancing solicitors for example.

We searched our database to find the top areas the Lawyers / Solicitors cover and created these pages to make it easier to find the Lawyer you want and need.

Over the next few days you may notice some changes to our site, mainly we are trying to purge the site of repeat listings.

This is a time consuming process but it should ensure that the listings on our site do not repeat, when your are browsing our site or visit the site via the likes of Google.co.uk you may come across an error page stating the page is no longer on our site.  This will be because the listing was removed.

Don’t forget you can still browse through out city pages and find a Lawyer / Solicitor close to you and read reviews and comments on them.

Over time regular users to our site may notice that certain listings and comments do go missing from time to time.

Although solicitalawyer.co.uk is an independent review site we often get e-mails from Solicitors / Lawyers that are threatening to take us to court / sue us.

Some of the companies listed on our site do have bad reviews / comments on our site.  Once the Law Companies see this they tend to send an e-mail demanding to have their listing removed before they take legal action against us.

This does make it hard for visitors (over 25,000 unique visitors a month) to see the honest reviews left on our site.

We would like to see all comments left on our site regardless but this is not always possible, we have taken many actions to ensure the comments are real and are not just 1 person with a ‘problem’ or just general spam.

There have been a handful of companies that ‘were’ listed on our site getting many bad comments from the public, these comments were checked before being enabled and were from different people in the UK (IP address / location checked) so we would like to say “always check the Lawyer / Solicitor company before using them, ask friends, look for reviews, find out as much information as possible before you choose a company.”