Solicitor Complaints Handling

For many years the Law Society has been both "trade union" and "regulator" for solicitors. This dual and conflicting role has been completely ineffective at protecting the public and has been widely criticised. An official government-commissioned report from 1999 was actually called "The Willing Blindness Report" - the title alone speaks volumes.

In the past decade it seems that whenever government announced that the Law Society was in the “Last Chance Saloon” because of its failure to deal with the increasing number of complaints against Solicitors, the Law Society merely changed the name of its regulatory body. Since 1986 we have had... The Solicitors Complaints Bureau (SCB), The Office for the Supervision of Solicitors (OSS) and The Consumer Complaints Service (CCS)

The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal’s (SDT - a division of the High Court) Annual Report to April 2007 reveals that only 67 Solicitors were struck off the Solicitors Roll when up to 17,000 Solicitors were reported to the Law Society year on year. Are 16,900+ complainants completely wrong or is this a really poor return? Check out the Which? Press Releases

Now we have The Legal Complaints Service (LCS) and the new Solicitors Regulatory Authority (SRA). It really does beg the question... Is there REALLY a difference THIS time or is it just another name change? It is our mission to find out.

About two years ago I came across a couple of official government pamphlets entitled "Solicitors Act 1974 - First Annual Report of the Lay Observer 1975 - 1976" and "Fourth Annual Report of the Lay Observer 1978" - Original prices 28p and 40p respectively. These were NOT the documents I was looking for, but they proved interesting, nonetheless....

The office of "Lay Observer" (it seems) was set up as a result of the Solicitors Act 1974 and the first person posted to this "office" was Rear Admiral Godfrey Place. It was his job to sit with the Law Society and observe it's complaints handling and write official reports on his observations.

Many of the observations of Rear Admiral Godfrey Place, the Lay Observer, with respect to solicitors costs and complaints were the SAME then as they are TODAY - despite 30 years, the Wolf Reforms, the Access to Justice Act, Willing Blindness and Clementi the very same problems dogged "the profession" in 2006 as did in 1976. How is this possible?

I do not know the history from 1978 to 1986. The Internet has many examples of the more recent history (and many more criticisms of the Law Society and the government) - more in the links and references section at the end of this page. Some are long and some are short. One succinct (but still much better than my opening paragraphs) comes from here. I have copied it below almost word for word and would like to thank the author - http://corruptlawyers.co.uk/

THE COMPLAINT’S PROCEDURE

Over the years the Law Society has set up various organisations and given them responsibilities to investigate complaints from the public. These organisations have very little powers and in practice the only purpose they serve is to obstruct the public and to introduce as long a delay as possible, before the public finally realises that they are being taken for a ride.

SCB [Solicitors Complaint Bureau]

The SCB was established by the Law Society in September 1986, to handle complaints about solicitors independently of the Law Society. The SCB was heavily criticised for being too slow at dealing with complaints and having a tendency to find reasons for not handling complaints, rather than finding aspects of complaints that it could do something about.

OSS [Office of the Supervision of Solicitors]

The OSS was set up in September 1996 by the Law Society to replace the SCB.

Former Law Society President, Michael Mears, wrote:

“The OSS operates on the basis of the fiction that the vast majority of its customers are worthy citizens, a great numbers of them, however, are typical Mr and Mrs Modern Brit, wingers and grievance mongers whose primary object in making a complaint is to avoid paying the bill.”

Performance of The Law Society and The Office for The Supervision of Solicitors (OSS)

In spite of substantial new initiatives, the complaints-handling performance of the OSS has continued to deteriorate: The OSS’ backlog has increased from 4,434 in January 2002, to 8,545 in September 2003; The OSS currently has a total of 281 complaints within its caseload that are more than two years old, of which 28 are more than three years old; [Note: this is particularly relevant to my case as I first complained to the Law Society in September 2003 - it took them 3 months to even get started and after 9 months they had achieved nothing]

The OSS is substantially underperforming in all but one of the performance targets set by the DCA for turnaround times, and has missed its satisfaction rating target by 18%.

CCS [Consumer Complaint’s Service]

As of 19 April 2004 the Law Society has again re-branded the SCB/OSS to the newly named Consumer Complaints Service [CCS]. [Note: once again this is significant for the complaints raised here - the change of name (may have, was certainly blamed) caused some delays. By then my MP, Dan Norris, had written to the Law Society and my case was transferred to the Parliamentary Casework Team - who did, if possible, even less.]

The Latest Reforms

All of the links below have been modified to open in a new window. If you want to study this in detail (and follow the links) you might do well to use the link above and look at it directly on the government web site. You will get a lot more links that way too (if you can stay awake?)

A bit of history

March 2001: The Office of Fair Trading publishes its report – Competition in the Professions – recommending that the rules governing the legal profession in England & Wales should be a subject to competition law.

July 2002: The Governments publishes a consultation paper – In the Public Interest? - that examines competition and regulation in the legal services market.

July 2003: The Department for Constitutional Affairs publishes a report on ‘Competition and regulation in the legal services market’.

July 2003: The Government appoints Sir David Clementi to carry out an independent review of the legal profession in order to identify a framework model that would promote competition within the legal profession as well as represent public and consumer interest.

December 2004: Sir David Clementi's Report - Review of the Regulatory Framework for Legal Services in England and Wales is published.

October 2005: The Government publishes its White Paper - The Future of Legal Services: Putting Consumers First- which sets an agenda for legal services reform.

May 2006: The Draft Legal Service Bill is published.

July 2006: The Joint Committee’s review of the draft Legal Service Bill is published.

September 2006: The Government’s response to the Joint Committee’s report is published.

November 2006 The Legal Services Bill is published.

October 2007: After a longer than expected passage through Parliament, on 30th October 2007 the new Legal Services Act was granted Royal Assent.

Links and References

"The fact is that 10 years or so ago, a complaint against the legal profession was almost a waste of time—the profession did not take complaints seriously, and often ignored them and brushed them under the carpet. The profession certainly did not respond sensitively to consumers." Bridget Prentice 22nd July 2008 (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Ministry of Justice; Lewisham East, Labour - the Lady who took the Legal Services Act through Parliament)

Have things changed in 10 years? LCS-Test and the LCS-Test Survey intend to FIND OUT!

Solicitor Complaints Handling - some history...

The Latest Reforms

A bit of history

Links and References