Our Complaints Policy

We are committed to providing a high quality legal service to all our clients. When something goes wrong we must tell you, and ask that you initiate the firms complaints procedure by telling us about it.

We use the following definitions:-

Formal Complaint is a ‘formal’ complaint from a client made to the Senior Partner (either directly by the client or via the Legal Ombudsman (Office for Legal Complaints) (LEO)) and must be dealt with in accordance with SRA procedures. The Complaints Partner shall ensure that full cooperation is provided in such instances.
Dissatisfaction is any other substantive expression of dissatisfaction (oral or written) regarding the practice’s services or of its personnel in the conduct of their duties or any request to speak to someone’s Supervisor. Such dissatisfaction may indicate potential for improvement in the practice’s processes and will be dealt with informally via ‘in-house’ procedures.

Our complaints procedure

  • If you have a complaint, please first contact the fee earner dealing with your case and discuss your grievance with them. If you are not satisfied within 14 days submit the details of your complaint in writing to that fee earner if you have not already done so.
  • Upon receipt of a written complaint this will be referred to the fee earner dealing with your matter and a copy will be given to our client care partner (currently Ms Ghazia Butt). We will acknowledge receipt of your complaint within 2 working days. If the complaint concerns the client care partner a copy will be given to another senior solicitor whose name will be provided to you. The complaint will be entered in our Central Register.
  • We will then investigate your complaint. If we require further information we will let you know within 14 days of receiving your complaint. We may request you to attend a meeting to discuss your complaint. In any event, we shall endeavour to give a full reply within 21 days of having sufficient information from you.
  • If you are unable to resolve your complaint with our fee earner, or receive no reply, your next step is to write direct to our Principal (or in the case of a complaint against her to the alternative senior solicitor notified or any other solicitor in the absence of notification) asking him or her to investigate your complaint.
  • Your complaint will then be reviewed again and you may expect either a request to attend a meeting to discuss your complaint or a full reply within 21 days of receipt of your request.
  • At this stage, if you are still not satisfied you can write to the Principal again. We will then arrange to review our decision. This will happen within 21 days.
  • You should allow us up to 8 weeks to resolve your complaint. If, after 8 weeks, we have failed to deal with your complaint to your satisfaction, you can involve the Legal Ombudsman.
  • If you are not happy with our final response, you have up to 6 months to bring your complaint to the Legal Ombudsman. The Legal Ombudsman will accept complaints up to 6 years from the date of the actual omission of which you are complaining about, or 3 years from the date when you should have known about the complaint. This only applies to problems which have happened on or after 6th October 2010. If the problem happened earlier than that, you must not have been aware of it before 6th October 2010.
  • The contact details of the Legal Ombudsman are:
    Legal Ombudsman
    PO Box 6806
    Wolverhampton WV1 9WJ
    Tel: 0300 555 0333
    Email: enquiries@legalombudsman.org.uk
    Website: www.legalombudsman.org.uk

NB If we have to change any of the timescales above, we will let you know and explain why.