Sir Stephen Lander, who recently stepped down as the Law Society's independent commissioner, outlines the improvements in consumer redress

On 1 November 2002, I became the Law Society's first and only independent commissioner on a three-year appointment, with responsibility for overseeing, and advising on, the way the Society handled complaints against its members. Apart from a happy association with my own solicitor, I had not, at that stage, had much to do with the profession in my previous private or working life.


Soon after my appointment, I noticed three things about the context of the Law Society's complaints handling. First were the behaviour, business approaches, specialisms and profitability of solicitors and their practices, which were so diverse as to make it impracticable, not to say unwise, to generalise about the profession's dealings with its clients or the competence of its members.


Commentators and regulators alike continue, on occasion, to miss this key point and to offer sweeping generalisations, which, to my mind, undermine much of what they say.


Second, I found that the Law Society itself employed a good number of able, conscientious and decent people who cared about the profession's reputation and the duty owed to its clients. But, third, it became clear that they were struggling with inappropriate processes to address complainants' concerns, and against a background of expectations for prompt redress, conditioned by the different consumer context of the high street, and of goods not complex services.


Looking back three years later, the overall context has not really changed, but the Law Society's approach and the pace with which the complaints casework is dispatched has, and for the better.


To my mind, the single most important decision taken over that period was to separate the Society's consideration of consumer redress from its enforcement of the profession's rules, thereby allowing more focused efforts on the former, and a more proportionate, risk-based, approach to the latter. The distinction has since been reflected both in Sir David Clementi's recommendations and in the recent White Paper on regulatory reform, and will presumably be entrenched in legislation in due course.


So far as consumer redress is concerned, one can consider the Law Society's performance of today as a glass half full or a glass half empty, according to taste. On the positive side, a small minority of the profession's lay clients now receive an inadequate service from their solicitors, and the Society's handling of those cases has improved markedly since a low point at the end of the last century. On the negative side, that small minority still represents a significant number of clients with a genuine grievance, and no one inside or outside the Law Society who is familiar with the issues doubts that yet further improvement in complaints handling is not both required and possible.


Moreover, the casework reveals the attitude, performance and behaviour of a few solicitors to be deeply worrying for a profession that aspires to a brand characterised by competence, client service and reliability. There are issues here, of course, for the regulation of the profession as much as for the handling of individual complaints, with much still to be done to address the weak performers and the (very few) genuinely dishonest.


I enjoyed my time as commissioner and am grateful for having had the opportunity to contribute to improvements in its handling of complaints.


It has been a stimulating episode in my career, and overall, I am a glass half full commentator about the Law Society. Wearing its new separate representative and regulatory hats, it, as well as most solicitors, should see coming legislation as presenting more opportunities than threats for the future.


Sir Stephen Lander now sits as a lay member of the Law Society's regulation board as well as being the chairman of the Serious Organised Crime Agency