The annual report of the Legal Services Complaints Commissioner has always been a slightly odd doc­ument in our view – for its length, if nothing else.

You wonder why a 20-person organisation whose sole task is to oversee the Law Society’s complaints-handling activity has to produce an annual report that, this year, is a whopping 100-pages long. With the best will in the world, we doubt a large number of people will be reading it.

Perhaps that explains why this year they have invested in an archly stylised report that is ‘marked up’ with red biro and highlighter pen, as well as faux Post-it notes and sections added with paper clips (the page here is the front cover, believe it or not), to simulate being a draft. On the contents page, some of the page numbers have been changed in red pen with a note ‘Remember to renumber pages’. You get the idea.

But there is method in their madness, it appears. The design, we’re told, ‘reflects the fact that improving legal complaints handling is still a work in progress [hence the name of the report] and not a finished project’.

As to the cost, however, they are a bit more coy. All the commissioner’s office would say is that it was within budget and cost less than last year’s 112-pager (which was down from 125 pages the year before, so we are making slow progress).

We assume, by the way, that the words ‘A quietly competent regulator’ scrawled on the cover are meant to apply to the OLSCC. But is that also a work in progress?