We are committed to providing high quality service to all clients. However, if something goes wrong we need you to tell us about it. This will help us to improve and maintain our standards.
Our Complaints Procedure
If you have a complaint that we have not been able to resolve please write to us with the details.
What will happen next
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- We will send you a letter acknowledging your complaint, which may ask for more details or information. We will also let you know the name of the person who will be dealing with your complaint. You can expect to receive our letter within seven days of us receiving your complaint.
- We will record your complaint in our central register and open a separate file for your complaint. We will do this within three days of receiving your complaint.
- We will respond to any reply to our acknowledgement letter and confirm what will happen next. You can expect to hear from us within seven days of your reply.
- We will then start to investigate your complaint. This will involve investigation of the file and a review of the matter with the fee earner concerned and any other enquiries which it is felt prudent to undertake. We will complete our investigation within fourteen days.
- The person dealing with your complaint will then invite you to meet him and discuss, and hopefully resolve, your complaint. He will do this within three days of completing the investigation. In the event that a meeting takes place, we will write to you within three days to confirm what occurred and any solutions that have been agreed. If you do not want a meeting, or it is not possible, we will send you a detailed reply to your complaint. This will include suggestions for resolving the matter. We will do this within five days of completing our investigation.
- At this stage if you are still not satisfied you can write to us again. We will then arrange to review our decision. This will happen in one of the following ways :-
- Within ten days another partner of the firm will review our decision, or
- Within ten days we will ask our local Law Society or another local firm of Solicitors to review your complaint. We will let you know how long this process will take, or
- Within five days we will invite you to agree to an independent mediation. We will let you know how long this process will take and what it will entail.
- We will let you know the result of the review undertaken under point 6 above within five days of it being completed. At this time we will write to you confirming our final position on your complaint and explaining our reasons but if you are still not satisfied you can:
- Contact the Legal Ombudsman about your complaint. Your complaint must be submitted to the Legal Ombudsman within six months of our determination of your complaint and no later than six years after the reason for the complaint occurred or three years after you should reasonably have known about it. The Legal Ombudsman will not accept complaints where the reason for the complaint occurred before 6th October 2010 or you became aware of the reason for the complaint before that date The address of the Legal Ombudsman is P.O. Box 6806 Wolverhampton WV1 9WJ. Telephone 0300 555 0333 and e-mail enquiries@legalombudsman.org.uk or go to legalombudsman.org.uk; or
- Contact an alternative complaints body (such as ProMediate by going to promediate.co.uk) which is competent to deal with complaints about legal services should both you and our firm wish to use the scheme.
- If you believe that the Firm or an individual within the Firm has breached a Solicitors Regulation Authority Principle then a complaint can be made to the SRA directly. Details of SRA Principles can be found at https://www.sra.org.uk/consumers/who-we-are/sra-regulate/#principles and the complaints procedure is available at https://www.sra.org.uk/consumers/problems/report-solicitor/.
Please note that any reference in our timescale to days means working days.
If we have to change any of the timescales above we will let you know and explain why.