Booth, Ince and Knowles 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 have a complaint which cannot be resolved with the person dealing with your matter, please write to their Supervising Partner with the details.
1. We will send you a letter acknowledging your complaint and may ask you to provide additional information or explain in more detail. We will also let you know the name of the person who will be dealing with your complaint. You can expect to receive our letter within 3 working days of us receiving your complaint.
2. We will record your complaint in our central register and open a separate file for your complaint. We will do this within 3 working days of receiving your complaint.
3. Once we have any further information from you that we may have requested or, if none was requested, we will then start to investigate your complaint. This will normally involve the following steps:
• The Supervising Partner will undertake a review within 5 working days.
• The member of staff who acted for you will be asked for their comments within a further 5 working days.
• Their comments will be reviewed together with your file within 3 working days of their receipt.
4. You will receive a detailed reply to your complaint including suggestions for resolving the matter. This will be done within 5 working days of completing the investigation. The Supervising Partner may also invite you to a meeting to discuss and, hopefully, resolve your complaint. Within 3 working days of any such meeting, you will receive a letter confirming what took place and any solutions agreed with you.
5. At that stage, if you are still not satisfied, you can write to us again. We will then arrange to review our decision. This will happen in one of the following ways.
• Another Partner of the firm will review the matter within 5 working days.
• We will ask our local Law Society or another local firm of solicitors to review your complaint within 5 working days. We will let you know how long this process will take.
• We will invite you to agree to independent mediation within 5 working days. 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 explaining our reasons.
If you still remain dissatisfied and your complaint concerns a matter of poor service, you can contact the the Legal Ombudsman at PO Box 6806 Wolverhampton WV1 9WJ. Any complaint to them must usually be made within 6 months of the date of our final decision. For further information, please contact them on 0300 555 0333 or refer to www.legalombudsman.org.uk.
Alternatively, the Solicitors Regulation Authority has the power to consider complaints regarding misconduct in which regard you should refer to: www.sra.org.uk/consumers/problems/report-solicitor/
