Beaconsfield 01494 730 722 | Bourne End 01628 533 350

Complaints

Brittons Solicitors are committed to providing a quality legal service to all our clients. However, we accept that there may be times when something goes wrong or a client believes they have reason to complain. We therefore have a procedure to try to resolve these issues in a swift and effective manner.

A copy of our policy for dealing with complaints is available from our Bourne End office on request.

What is a complaint?
We will treat any contact from a client indicating that our service has not met the standard that they expected from us as a complaint.s

Prospective clients
Under certain circumstances we may deal with complaints from prospective clients (i.e. those who have contacted us about a potential matter but who we have not been formally instructed by). In particular, we will accept any complaint that we have unreasonably refused a service someone or that we have persistently or unreasonably offered a service that the person does not want.

Making a complaint
Mr Gianfranco De Franco is the director who handles all complaints. He can be contacted at our Bourne End office, which is situated at 2 The Parade, Bourne End SL8 5SY, or by email at gianfranco@brittons.law.

The procedure

  1. Within seven days we will acknowledge receipt of your complaint, set out our understanding of it and request your confirmation that you wish us to deal with the matter in accordance with our complaints procedure, or we may seek any necessary clarification from you.
  2. The complaint will be registered in our Central Register (for monitoring and management information purposes) and a separate file may be opened.
  3. Within seven days we will acknowledge receipt of your confirmation letter or telephone call and confirm what will happen next.
  4. We will then begin investigating your complaint. This may involve us asking the person who dealt with your matter to comment upon to your complaint. We normally expect them to do this within 14 days.
  5. Once this has happened and the matter has been fully reviewed, we will either write to you with a detailed response to your complaint and with any suggestions we have for resolving it to our mutual satisfaction, or invite you to a meeting to discuss the same. If it appears to us that the complaint was justified, then we will apologise and offer you suitable recompense. We will ask you to reply to let us know if you are satisfied with this offer.
  6. The written response or meeting will normally take place within 30 days of our receipt of your initial complaint. If we need more time to investigate, we will tell you how much longer it will take.
  7. If from your written reply to our detailed written response, you remain dissatisfied with what we said and how we propose resolving your complaint we will arrange for our decision to be reviewed. This may happen in one of the following ways:
    • by Mr De Franco reviewing his own handling of your complaint and why you are dissatisfied with his decision; or
    • by arranging for one of the other directors of the firm who are entirely unconnected with the complaint to review the complaint, the response, the file and any other relevant information, how the complaint was handled and the decision on it; or
    • by inviting you to agree to a process of formal mediation through an independent mediator (if this is available).
  8. The review will take place within 14 days of your requesting it, but we will notify you if for some reason we need more time to do this (for example, if there is no other director who can review the matter within that time because they are away from the office). After the review has taken place you will be informed of the outcome. This will review our initial handling of your complaint and our decision on it. If the outcome of the review is an invitation to mediation, this will take some further time, as determined by the mediator.
  9. If you still remain dissatisfied with how your complaint has been handled and the decision on it, we will write to you within seven days of your telling us this. We will then confirm our final position on your complaint and explain why we consider our handling of, and decision on, it (and of any review) was reasonable.
  10. At this stage you may take your complaint to the Legal Ombudsman. The Legal Ombudsman is the independent body established by the Legal Services Act 2007 as an independent and impartial organisation to deal with complaints against solicitors. The Legal Ombudsman may:
    • Investigate the quality of professional service supplied by a solicitor to a client;
    • Investigate allegations that a solicitor has breached rules of professional conduct;
    • Investigate allegations that a solicitor has unreasonably refused to supply a professional service to a prospective client;
    • Investigate allegations that a solicitor has persistently or unreasonably offered a professional service that the client does not want.

Before it will consider a complaint the Legal Ombudsman generally requires that the firm’s internal Complaints Procedure has been exhausted. If the Legal Ombudsman decides that the firm’s proposals for resolving a complaint are reasonable, it may decline to investigate further.

The Legal Ombudsman’s contact details are as follows:
Legal Ombudsman
PO Box 6167
Slough
SL1 0EH

Telephone: 0300 555 0333 Website: www.legalombudsman.org.uk Email: enquiries@legalombudsman.org.uk

Normally, you will need to bring a complaint to the Legal Ombudsman in accordance with the following rules:

  • The complaint must be made within six months of receiving our written confirmation of our final position on your complaint

and also

  • within a year from the date of the act or omission giving rise to the complaint; or
  • within a year from the date you should reasonably have known there are grounds for complaint.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority
The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) will investigate complaints about the behaviour of solicitors. This could be for things like dishonesty, unprofessional conduct or treating you unfairly because of your age, a disability or because you have another protected characteristic.

You can raise your concerns with the SRA by following the procedure set out at www.sra.org.uk/consumer/problems