Our Complaints Procedure
We are committed to providing a high quality legal service to all our clients. However, if at any point you become unhappy with this firm’s service, the Director responsible for resolving complaints is Miss Kerry Boyes.
Details of any complaint should ideally be made in writing and will be passed to Kerry Boyes, although if you wish to make your complaint verbally you can do so. Please contact Kerry Boyes. Please note that comments or posts made on Social media or the website will not constitute an official complaint for these purposes.
What will happen next?
1. We will record your complaint in our central record of complaints and open a file for your complaint.
2. We will begin to investigate your complaint. This is likely to involve asking the member of staff who acted for you to respond to your complaint. We will then consider their response and the information in your complaint. We may then ask you for further information. This may take up to ten working days.
3. We may write to you and invite you to meet Kerry Boyes and/or the member of staff involved to hopefully resolve your complaint. Where relevant, we will do this within three working days of receiving all the information we need from you and the member of staff involved.
4. Within three working days of any meeting we will write to you to confirm what took place and any solutions we have agreed with you.
5. If you do not want a meeting or for any reason this is not possible, we will send you a detailed written response to your complaint. This will include our suggestions for resolving the matter. This will happen within five working days of us completing our investigation.
6. At this stage, if you are still not satisfied, you can contact us again. We will then review our decision about your complaint. This will happen in one of the following ways:
(a) The member of staff involved in your complaint will review his/her own decision within five working days;
(b) We will arrange for someone in the firm who has not been involved in your complaint to review it. This will be done within ten working days.
(c) Kerry Boyes, the Director responsible for complaints, will review your complaint within ten working days;
(d) Within five working days we will ask our local Law Society to review your complaint. We will then let you know how long this process will take;
(e) We will invite you to agree to independent mediation. We will let you know how long this process will take.
7. We will let you know the outcome of the review within five working days of the end of the review process. We will do this by writing to you informing you of our final position on your complaint and explaining our reasons. We have 8 weeks from receipt of it, to complete our review of your complaint. After that, you may make a complaint to the Legal Ombudsman: details are below. We will ensure that your complaint is dealt with promptly, fairly and free of charge.
The Legal Ombudsman’s time limits for investigating complaints are:
1 Within six months of receiving our final response to your complaint;
2 Six years from the date of act/omission or
3 Three years from when you should reasonably have known there was cause for complaint (if the act took place more than six years ago)
If you would like more information about the Legal Ombudsman their contact details are as follows:
Visit www.legalombudsman.org.uk
Call: 0300 555 0333.
Calls to 0300 numbers will cost no more than calls to national geographic numbers (starting 01 or 02) from both mobiles and landlines, and will be included as part of any inclusive call minutes or discount schemes in the same way of geographic calls.