Clients or Customers?
Is the lawyer’s preference for the word “client” instead of “customer” anything more than protectionism for the arcane?
The UK Office of the Legal Ombudsman doesn’t seem to think so.
Three years ago the first press release issued by the Ombudsman’s office deliberately chose the word “customer” to symbolize the change which its arrival heralded. So explains Adam Sampson the UK’s Chief Ombudsman in the Guardian last week.
The view of the Legal Ombudsman, it seems, is that the word “client ” trails behind it habitual thinking about the provision of legal services that neither can, nor should, survive:
. . . [more]The