Our complaints policy
We are committed to providing a high quality legal service to all of our clients. When something goes wrong, we need you to tell us about it. This will help us to improve our standards.
If you have a complaint, please contact us with the details. This may be by post, telephone, email or in person.
As explained in our engagement letter, you should raise the matter initially with the person carrying out your work or the person responsible for the supervision of your matter who will endeavour to resolve the problem immediately.
If the problem cannot be resolved to your satisfaction or as an alternative in any event, you may refer the matter to our Complaints Officer and Managing Director, Jonathan Hall, who is the person with overall responsibility for complaints. He will deal with your complaint in accordance with the procedure set out below.
What will happen next?
- We will write to you acknowledging receipt of your complaint within 3 working days of receiving it.
- We will then investigate your complaint. This will normally involve our Complaints Officer reviewing your matter file and speaking to the member of staff who acted for you.
- Within 10 working days of sending you the acknowledgement letter, our Complaints Officer will either:
- write to you with his response to your complaint and proposal (if any) for resolving the matter; or
- invite you to a meeting to discuss and hopefully resolve your complaint.
- If a meeting is held, our Complaints Officer will write to you within 5 working days to confirm what took place and any solutions he has agreed with you.
- If you do not want a meeting or it is not possible to arrange one, our Complaints Officer will write to you (within 10 working days of being made aware of this) with his response and proposal (if any) for resolving the matter.
- At this stage, if you are still not satisfied, you should contact us again and we will arrange for another director of the firm to review the Complaints Officer’s decision.
- We will write to you within 10 working days of receiving your request for a review, confirming our final position on your complaint and explaining our reasons.[Note: If we are unable to meet any of these timescales (e.g. due to complexity of the matter; volume of paperwork; or annual leave, etc.) we will write to you explaining the reason(s).]
- If your complaint has not been resolved to your satisfaction within eight weeks of being made to us, or sooner in certain exceptional circumstances, you may have it looked at by the Legal Ombudsman, an independent body established under the Legal Services Act to investigate complaints about service issues with lawyers.
- The Legal Ombudsman expects complaints to be made to them within one year of the date of the act or omission about which you are concerned or within one year of you realising there was a concern. You must also refer your concerns to the Legal Ombudsman within six months of our final response to you.
The Legal Ombudsman’s contact details are as follows:
Postal address – PO Box 6167, Slough, SL1 0EH
Telephone – 0300 555 0333 Email – enquiries@legalombudsman.org.uk
You may also complain to the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) if you think we have breached an SRA Principle or are guilty of dishonesty or discrimination.
The SRA’s contact details are as follows:
Postal address – The Cube, 199 Wharfside Street, Birmingham, B1 1RN
Telephone – 0370 606 2555 Email – report@sra.org.uk
