Our Complaints Policy
We are committed to providing a high quality legal service to all our clients. When something goes wrong we need you to tell us about it. This will help us to improve our standards.
Our Complaints Procedure
If you are our Client and have a complaint, please contact us with the details. We have eight weeks to consider your complaint. If we have not resolved it within this time you may contact to the Legal Ombudsman.
What will happen next?
Within three working days of receiving your complaint:
We will pass your complaint to Ian Bentley, our Client Care Director, who will record your complaint in our Central Register and open a separate file for your complaint.
Mr Bentley will send you a letter acknowledging your complaint, enclosing a copy of this procedure. If necessary, he will request clarification of any aspects of the complaint.
We will then start to investigate your complaint. This will normally involve the following steps:-
Mr Bentley will ask the member of staff who acted for you to comment on your complaint within seven working days.
Mr Bentley will then examine the complaint on receiving the members of staff’s comments and will review the information on your matter file. This will take up to a further seven working days from receiving all the available information.
Mr Bentley will send you a detailed reply to your complaint. This will include his suggestions for resolving the matter. If necessary, and appropriate, he will invite you to a meeting to discuss, and hopefully resolve, your complaint. He will do this within a further five working days.
If you do not wish to have a meeting, or it is not possible or convenient for you, Mr Bentley will discuss the matter with you on the telephone. Within five working days of any meeting, or telephone call, Mr Bentley will write to you to confirm what took place and any solutions he has agreed with you.
At this stage, if you are still not satisfied you can contact us again. We will then arrange to review our decision. This will happen in one of the following ways:-
Within ten working days another Director of the firm will review Mr Bentley’s decision.
We will let you know the result of the review within five working days at the end of the review. At this time we will write to you, confirming our final position on your complaint and explaining our reasons.
If you are still not satisfied, you can then contact the Legal Ombudsman at PO Box 6806, Wolverhampton WV1 9WJ / enquiries@legalombudsman.org.uk / 0300 555 0333 about your complaint. Any complaint to the Legal Ombudsman must usually be made within six months of the date of our final response on your complaint but for further information you should contact the Legal Ombudsman directly. We very much hope that this will not be necessary.
Alternative complaints bodies such as ProMediate http://www.promediate.co.uk/ exist which are competent to deal with complaints about legal services should both you and our firm wish to use such a scheme. We do not however agree to use ProMediate.
In the event that we have to change any of the time scales, we will let you know and explain why this has been necessary.