![David Lester (senior partner at Blythe Liggins), Darryl Barnes, Jagdeep Sandher (head of dispute resolution at Blythe Liggins)[4]](https://d1d8vslyhr7rdg.cloudfront.net/Pictures/274x183/4/2/8/116428_davidlesterseniorpartneratblytheligginsdarrylbarnesjagdeepsandherheadofdisputeresolutionatblytheliggins4_981603_crop.jpg)
Adam Sampson
FeatureVolunteering for regulation
Should we open our doors to unregulated providers via a voluntary scheme?
FeatureComplaints clinic: meeting clients’ needs
Make reasonable adjustments and you won’t go far wrong.
FeatureClients need to know their rights
While many law firms are handling complaints better, solicitors still have a regulatory obligation to inform their customers of their right to complain.
FeatureCase fee decisions
We all like to complain. There is probably somebody sat nearby in your office complaining about something right now.
- News
Customers or clients?
Believe it or not, being chief Legal Ombudsman does not lend itself to fan mail. On the contrary, when a letter or email arrives – looking insidiously like private correspondence from a lawyer – my natural inclination is to mull over what I might have said recently in the press ...
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Extending our jurisdiction
Despite hysterical ‘end of the world’ concerns about fiscal cliffs and apocalyptic Mayan calendars, it seems we all managed to see out Christmas without too much controversy.
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Learn from your mistakes
The good ship Legal Ombudsman has been navigating some pretty treacherous waters of late. We have managed to steer past one or two potential rocks – notably the announcement that we will be taking on claims management complaints from next year, and then the publication of the first quarter of ...
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Legal insurance should not confuse clients
If there are two words guaranteed to send any audience to sleep in an instant, they are these: Annual Report. By God, they are dull - I should know, I have written enough of the damn things. You know that very few people are going to read them but you ...
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Avoiding conveyancing complaints
By the end of this article, at least in draft form, I fully expect a page full of red squiggles, erroneously identifying the noun ‘conveyancing’ as a misspelling. I have no idea why Word fails to recognise it, given its widespread and generally quite prolific use in legal circles. Perhaps ...
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We need to make Ombudsman scheme fairer
Five years on from the arrival of the 2007 Legal Services Act we are still waiting for the ‘Big Bang’. What has come into existence seems less an entirely new universe, with a primordial cloud of traditional legal service providers accelerating away, transforming into clusters of one-stop-shop commercial enterprise (as ...
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Biggest dissatisfaction is with lawyers' costs
The older I get, the more I feel uncomfortable about the binary nature of our discourse. OK - a pretentious sentence, even by my standards. What do I mean?
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Looking again at the rules
It is embarrassing how far, despite all your efforts to suppress them, your teenage obsessions come back to haunt you. Not a problem if your adolescent self showed any semblance of cool. But nerdy classicist is not exactly the image I want to cultivate.
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Managing the implications of ABSs
As Birmingham is our home, we have paid tribute to the city by naming some of our meeting rooms after its famous landmarks. One of them is named after Spaghetti Junction, a Medusa’s head of highways. It can take you where you need to go, but it is a long ...
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Ombudsman can also exonerate
There has been a lot of discussion about the Legal Ombudsman’s recent announcement on publishing the names of lawyers who have given poor service to their clients. The LeO was keen to emphasise that this applies to only a small proportion of lawyers.
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Lawyers could avoid complaints by addressing simple quality issues
A year since we launched - and I suppose we have to accept that it is now officially the end of the beginning. Frankly, it is a bit of a shock to realise that we have been up and running for that length of time. It comes as an even ...
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LeO dealing with lawyers who don't engage
Nearly a year into the life of the Legal Ombudsman and we have seen thousands of cases. These cases are not quite as we thought they would be when we started - nothing in our modelling prepared us for family law overtaking conveyancing as the most complained about area of ...
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Naming and shaming firms well supported but fraught with difficulties
One of the unexpected difficulties in doing the press and publicity around the recent publication of our annual report was the issue of how we brought the bare statistics alive by giving real examples of our work. For the annual report itself that was easy – we simply used the ...
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When should the ombudsman involve the SRA?
As a new creation and as a lay organisation, rather than one already embedded in the minds of lawyers, LeO has always considered it important to try to break down the barriers between us and the profession.