The Legal Complaints Service (LCS) may not see a new complaints management system until 2009 after the Law Society halted the project.


This means the LCS will not be able to track proactively whether it is hitting its targets or post complaints online as it had hoped, and improvements to workflows the LCS was ‘building its future on’ have been suspended for an indeterminate period.



It is currently uncertain whether the system, halted last month, will appear in its current form. The project has been running since August 2006 after a trial. The LCS reports that the cost overrun is ‘not a significant figure’ and that the project was halted because the system architecture has become so complicated as to be unworkable.



LCS chief executive Deborah Evans said she was very disappointed. ‘It’s a tool we were building our future on, impacting on a number of issues,’ she said. ‘At the moment we can only tell if we’re hitting targets through auditing. There is absolutely no doubt that we would have gained significant benefit from the system.’ The Law Society offered no comment.



It now seems unlikely the LCS will have a new system until the beginning of 2009 at the earliest. The current system, called ROAD, ‘works but doesn’t give proper workflow management’, said Ms Evans.



The LCS had wanted to start analysing equality and diversity information, auditing complaints against targets in real time and putting information about complaints online. Equality and diversity information collation will now have to take place using more labour-intensive methods.



Rupert White