Complaints Procedure

Policy

We are committed to providing a high quality legal service to all our clients.  If something goes wrong, we want you to tell us.  Your feedback will help us improve our standards.

Our Procedure

If you believe we have not dealt with your case, or with an aspect of your case, as we should have then this will be treated as a complaint.

If it has not been possible to resolve your concerns with the person dealing with your case, we would ask that you contact their supervisor. You should have been provided with details of who this in the documentation sent to you at the start of your matter. If you do not have this information to hand then you can simply call the office and ask to speak to one of the partners, who will then ensure that an appropriate person makes contact with you as a matter of urgency.  

The firm’s Managing Partner is Victoria Matthews and she has overall responsibility for dealing with complaints.

What will happen next?

This will depend on the nature of the complaint and how, following an initial conversation between you and the appropriate supervisor, it is agreed the matter should proceed.

Sometimes it will be appropriate for there to be an early face to face meeting to assist us in better understanding your concerns. In other cases where the nature of your complaint is very clear it may be agreed between us that we move straight to an investigation of your complaint.

We will investigate your complaint by examining your file and asking the person with conduct of your file to provide his/her comments on your complaint.  We will provide you with an estimate of how long we anticipate this stage will take, and will inform you if for any reason this time frame needs to be extended. We would expect to deal with any complaint within a maximum of 8 weeks, but we would hope that it would often be more quickly than this. 

On completion of our internal investigation we will either write to you setting out the outcome of our investigation of your complaint, or if you prefer meet with you to discuss the outcome of our enquiries. We would follow up any such meeting with a letter confirming the outcome of our discussions and any agreement we have reached.

Our hope is that through a thorough investigation of the matter we will be able to respond satisfactorily to your concerns. If you believe your complaint remains unresolved then you can, within 6 months of receiving our final written response, ask the Legal Services Ombudsman to consider your complaint.

Details of the Legal Ombudsman’s service can be found at www.legalombudsman.org.uk.

The contact details for the Legal Services Ombudsman are:

The Legal Ombudsman
PO Box 6167
Slough SL1 0EH

Telephone: 0300 555 0333
Email: enquiries@legalombudsman.org.uk

Since April 2023 the time limit by which a complaint should be brought to the Legal Ombudsman is one year from the date of the act or omission being complained about or one year from when the complainant should have realised that there was cause for complaint. The Legal Ombudsman does however have discretion to accept complaints outside of these timescales where it determines it is fair and reasonable to do so.

As a firm we are regulated by the Solicitor Regulation Authority (SRA). Details of the SRA’s remit and the regulations to which are required to adhere can be found at www.sra.org.uk

If you believe an action on our part has been in breach of our code of conduct or the rules of our Regulator this complaint should be brought to the attention of the SRA.

The contact details for the SRA are:

SRA
The Cube
199 Wharfside Street
Birmingham
B1 1RN

Telephone: 0370 606 2555

Email: contactcentre@sra.org.uk