Client Care

The quality of service is absolutely brilliant.

             Chambers UK 2012

Our aim is to meet and exceed our clients’ expectations in all the work we do with them. To this end, we continuously monitor our people, systems and processes to ensure client satisfaction.

We encourage our clients’ honest feedback – both through regular client satisfaction surveys and online feedback forms. This feedback enables us to monitor and review our existing services, as well as to identify new services that would enhance our offering to clients.

We are very grateful to our existing clients for their positive feedback on our services, which led to us being named by Chambers UK as one of the best law firms in the UK for our client service in a number of our legal areas.

Learning and development is key and we invest in our people to ensure that they are trained and able to offer the highest standard of service. We have an established system for annual staff appraisals and a comprehensive training programme. We have a full set of resources, including an in-house trainer, available for training both lawyers and other staff.

We are also working towards compliance with the Law Society Lexcel quality standard, which enables us to measure and confirm the robustness of our quality systems.

Terms and Conditions

Our standard Terms and Conditions

Complaints

We are committed to providing a high-quality legal service to all our clients. If you are unhappy about any aspect of our service, please tell us about it. This will help us to ensure that we meet the highest standards and enable us to identify any areas we need to improve.

Complaints Procedure

If you are dissatisfied with either the service you have received or any aspect of your bill, please first contact the partner in charge of your matter.

If the complaint is in connection with that partner or they do not resolve the complaint to your satisfaction, we will delegate the handling of your complaint to an independent complaints handler for investigation.

How Does The Complaints Procedure Work?

  1. When you raise a complaint, we will send you a letter acknowledging your complaint and asking you to confirm or explain the details set out. We will also let you know the name of the person dealing with your complaint whether it is the partner or an independent complaints handler. You can expect to receive our letter within 5 working days of us receiving your complaint.
  2. We will record your complaint in our central register and open a file for your complaint. We will do this within 5 working days of receiving your complaint.
  3. We will then start to investigate your complaint. This may involve one or more of the following steps:
    We may ask the member of staff who acted for you to reply to your complaint within 15 working days.
    We may examine their reply and the information in the complaint file.
    We may then ask them for more information. This will take up to 5 working days from receiving their reply and the file.
  4. We will then send you a detailed reply to your complaint. This will include our suggestions for resolving the matter, in all but exceptional circumstances we will act upon the advice given by the independent complaints handler. This will happen within 5 working days of us completing our investigation.
  5. 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:
    We will write to you to agree for an independent complaints handler to review your complaint, they will do this in 28 working days.
    We will invite you to agree to independent mediation. We will let you know how long this process will take.
  6. We will let you know the result of the review within 5 working days of the end of the review. At this time we will write to you confirming our final position on your complaint and explain our reasons. If you are still not satisfied, the next step is for you to contact the Legal Ombudsman by the following methods:

Tel: 0300 555 0333
Tel outside UK: +44 12 245 3050
Email: enquiries@legalombudsman.org.uk
In writing: PO Box 6806, Wolverhampton WV1 9WJ
www.legalombudsman.org.uk

You must contact the Legal Ombudsman within six months of receiving a final written response from us about your complaint or within six years of the act or omission about which you are complaining occuring (or if outside this period, within three years of when you should reasonably have been aware of it).

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