Valets, butlers, housekeepers. Lawyers and accountants as service providers in the market of legal services for SMEs in Poland

ABSTRACT

This paper looks into the practices and meanings of legal services use by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Poland. Based on the results of extensive quantitative (n>7000) and qualitative (101 IDIs) studies, it finds that SMEs face significant access to justice barriers. While the studies find that apparent cost barriers cause this, they stress the limited complexity, time and organisational resources at SMEs’ disposal. Furthermore, the realities of small business in Poland and the wide use of private ordering often render legal services spurious. As a result, SME owners and managers adapt the legal services used to their businesses’ limited possibilities and most acute needs. In so doing, they appear to act rationally, with the view of maximising the economic output of their businesses. Despite the availability of lawyers, legal services are often delivered by accountants, and generally kept at a minimum. A typology of legal services used by SMEs created based on qualitative study results: “legal valeting”, “butlering”, and “housekeeping”, reflects this. Traditional home servants inspire these names and indicate the scope of service and the type of relationship between the professionals and service providers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For the purpose of the quantitative study, it was assumed that an SME is a registered for-profit business entity, employing up to 250 persons. The definition included self-employed persons. The obtained sample structure of active businesses corresponded with available public statistics of SMEs. In the qualitative study, also persons were interviewed who were economically active to the extent indicating that they run a firm, but who did not register it in compliance with the legal requirement. 2 The sampling procedure was similar in both samples. The pool was drafted from national registers of incorporated companies and persons who registered business activity (i.e. Central Registration And Information On Business, CEIDG, providing information on sole proprietorships and civil partnerships, and the Court Registrar providing information on companies). At the time of the study, the registers published businesses' complete contact data. Then, email invitations to participate in the study were sent to businesses on a rolling and adaptive basis for about two weeks. The invited businesses were selected randomly from the pool in such a way as to ensure that business types under-represented in the hitherto responses are proportionally oversampled. Not unexpectedly, this recruitment method proved vulnerable to non-response and technical issues with email providers. However, due to adaptive selection, the resulting sample accurately represented the population in all dimensions that could be established using official statistics of business activity in Poland, i.e. business type, industry, location and employment (in the latter aspect, official data quality was low). Regarding the deregistered businesses subsample, the national registers only provided contact data for owners of nonincorporated businesses (individuals who de-registered individual business activity). As a result, in this group, the study is only representative of sole proprietorships and civil partnerships, which is a limitation

2 The only excluded business category was agricultural production. In Poland, this sector may include both business-like activity as well as traditional farming and many hybrid forms. For that reason a decision was made to simplify sample selection by omitting this sector. 4 One interview was dropped from analysis due to respondent’s low credibility

3 The variables relating to legal consciousness and attitudes used in the study can be divided into three groups. The first group includes answers to questions about preferences towards compliance with the law and conflict resolution in an abstract approach without indicating the context. Here, select Kurczewski's (2017) and Podgórecki's (1966) questions were repeated to ensure compatibility with long-established earlier research. The second group includes preferences regarding legal services in hypothetical situations. The third group concerns the respondents' knowledge of Poland's law and legal services.

4 A series of multivariate analyses were run, testing the explanatory power of different independent variables. Models based on both manual and automated variable selection were used. In the latter case, a variable selection technique utilising Akaike Information Criterion's (AIC) minimisation was used, which generates the most powerful explanatory model possible for available independent variables. None of the variables measuring legal consciousness and attitudes alone, grouped, or in combination with other variables from the study was found to explain the decision to use legal services.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Science Centre: [Grant Number UMO-2016/21/B/HS5/00397].