As head of the Law Society’s consumer complaints service, Deborah Evans tells Neil Rose that forging a new identity and promoting independence are as important as hitting targets


It is arguably one of the least enviable jobs in the legal profession, but Deborah Evans seems pleased to be the new chief executive of the Law Society’s Consumer Complaints Service (CCS). And this is despite the fact that she knows she will have to leave it in a couple of years when the government’s proposed office for legal complaints (OLC) takes complaints-handling away from lawyers.



Ms Evans’ contract officially ends on 31 December 2007, although her view is that she will be needed for a further year before the OLC is up and running. ‘They have managed my expectations,’ she says – two other senior managers at the CCS are in the same position of knowing they will not be moving over when the OLC comes into being.



But far from being the worst job in the profession, she continues, ‘it is one of the most exciting because there’s a good job to be done. I like being busy’. That is just as well, because although the CCS is undoubtedly on an upswing since the dark days of the old Office for the Supervision of Solicitors at the turn of the century, there is clearly much to do. The persistent message from the Legal Services Complaints Commissioner (LSCC), Zahida Manzoor, is one of slow progress that is still not meeting her expectations of how a modern consumer complaints organisation should operate.



And time is against the former practice director of Birmingham law firm Anthony Collins. As well as the looming shadow of the OLC, Ms Evans has to deliver against the performance targets agreed with Ms Manzoor for the year to 31 March 2007, failing which the CCS could face a hefty fine. ‘In an ideal world, you would probably wait six months before making decisions, but that is not possible because of the short time-scale and the LSCC plan,’ she says.



Therefore, in her first week she ordered a new IT system – the preparatory work had already been done in-house – but she stresses that ‘while I have maybe jumped to some conclusions quite quickly, they will all be tested’.


Targets can become all-consuming, and distract from other vital work that needs to be done but does not contribute to meeting them. Ms Evans recognises this. ‘Targets are useful for motivation,’ she says. ‘If they are achievable but stretching, that’s great. But there is a tendency just to focus on figures for the year, so you don’t look at the next three to five years. I’m pulling together a change agenda of which the LSCC plan is just part.’

This includes establishing a clear identity for the CCS, ensuring it looks like a consumer organisation rather than a professional body. With its connection to the Law Society not emphasised, the name ‘doesn’t say what it is. They do get complaints about washing machines’. Identity may be all about signalling independence, ‘but the other thing I’m working on is actually being independent. We have to show that independence is real’. As things stand, the only real control the Law Society Council has over the CCS is its budget and any changes it may want to make to the practice rules (over which it still has theoretical control); Ms Evans says she wants to review practice rule 15.

Ms Evans, who is not a lawyer, says that five years ago, she would find that any complaint against Anthony Collins lodged at Leamington Spa would take an ‘inordinate amount of time to deal with’ – years, let alone months. But then, about three years ago, she says she ‘noticed that decision-making had improved’.

But that is about as much looking back as Ms Evans allows herself. How the CCS has operated in the past is of little interest to her and it must be valuable to the Law Society to have in place a leadership – including the relatively new Consumer Complaints Board (CCB) – that is untainted by past failings. She reports a positive first meeting with Ms Manzoor, whose relationship with some Law Society officials in the past has been strained. ‘We have a shared goal – an efficient, easily accessible service,’ comments Ms Evans.

The new chief executive is also working against the background of making the CCS ‘fit for purpose’ to form the backbone of the OLC. The government’s announcement in June that the OLC will be sited in the west midlands – although away from Leamington Spa – brought much-needed certainty to staff, who potentially will be transferred over to the new body. The OLC will be strongly consumer-facing and that is what the CCS is trying to evolve into now. ‘It’s a cultural move from being part of the Law Society – a sort of parent to the legal profession – to gaining our independence and becoming a critical friend,’ she says.

As such, she is looking to strip out some stages of the lengthy complaints process to make it more consumer focused – the number of appeals built into the system are the legacy of a structure created by lawyers, she indicates – and also increase the use of alternative methods of resolution. Conciliation, for example, may prevent lawyers being overly adversarial in responding to complaints, as they are wont to do. More use of sanctions to stop solicitors dragging their heels in dealing with the CCS is also likely.

Nonetheless, Ms Evans is keen to emphasise that ‘I’m far from the enemy’ so far as solicitors are concerned. ‘I recognise the importance of solicitors as stakeholders in the CCS,’ she says. ‘I want to produce a service they can be proud of.’


The revelation that the CCS is considering publicising all firms’ complaints records may make some sceptical about this, although it is in line with the modern trend of transparency and league tables (see (2006) Gazette, 7 September, 1). For Ms Evans, and indeed CCB chairman Shamit Saggar, the first stage of this process is arguably the more important one – capturing the information about what is happening within law firms in relation to complaints. There is currently a yawning information gap between setting out the in-house complaints-handling requirements in practice rule 15 and receiving a complaint at Leamington. In essence, the CCS has little idea of what the profession’s approach to complaints truly is.


By requiring firms to make an annual return on complaints, the CCS will be able to disseminate good and bad practice, identify those firms that may need individual help and also manage its own external risk by providing an indication of the number of complaints that could end up coming through its door. Ms Evans acknowledges that the second step of publicising complaints records will depend on whether the information can be presented properly and in context.

She says she was ‘pleasantly surprised’ by the CCS she inherited in July. ‘Some of the processes are sophisticated and well thought-out,’ she says – but that does not prevent her from planning a thorough review of how the CCS works. ‘I am committed to getting the organisation efficient and costing less,’ she says, which will be good news for practising certificate payers. ‘But first I have to work out how much it costs now.’ The CCS has an annual budget of £37 million – a figure Ms Evans describes as expensive.

She disputes the LSCC’s estimate that each complaint costs the CCS £1,800 to close – ‘I don’t think it is anything like that’ – saying the service’s budget has never been truly separated from the rest of the Law Society’s, meaning there is cross-charging, shared overheads and the like. It makes sense to separate budgets now – ‘there is no way the OLC will want to buy central services from the Law Society,’ she points out.

One cost she will be looking at is the CCS outsourcing some complaints-handling to private practice law firms, the overuse of which Ms Manzoor has criticised. Ms Evans acknowledges that outsourcing has been used more than just to handle peaks in work – which is ‘the traditional business case’ for such a practice – possibly to overcome the recruitment problems it has long suffered. And though she emphasises that complainants are always asked for their agreement beforehand – and generally consumer satisfaction with the service is good – there is also a feeling that outsourcing (at £600 a case) costs more than if cases were done in-house.


Among the many other issues on her plate are the application of the ‘special payments’ policy – where the CCS makes an ex gratia payment over its own failings in handling a complaint – and increasing the use of local conciliation officers. Then there is the growing miners’ compensation scandal, over which Ms Manzoor has been particularly harsh on the CCS’s performance.


‘The thing to remember is that the LSCC always has the benefit of hindsight,’ Ms Evans says. ‘When we started, we didn’t realise it would get so big.’ Now, however, the CCS has built the experience needed in dealing with miners’ cases, she explains, and is actively encouraging more miners to come forward. ‘There are many solicitors who did a lot of good work,’ she adds. ‘But a few have let the profession down.’


Complaints have long been a monkey on the profession’s back. While the OLC will not just be a rebadged CCS, the work Ms Evans is doing now will heavily influence the body that will take over from it. Every period of the CCS’s existence – and that of its predecessors – has been a critical one, but this perhaps is the most critical of all.