It has been just over a year since Deborah Evans became Chief Executive of the Legal Complaints Service. She talks to Neil Rose about 12 months of targets and floods
Change has been a recurring theme at the body that handles complaints against solicitors over the past decade. It has changed identity no fewer than three times – from the Solicitors Complaints Bureau to the Office for the Supervision of Solicitors to the Consumer Complaints Service to, as of this year, the Legal Complaints Service (LCS). Its leadership has also changed a few times.
And when Deborah Evans was appointed in July 2006, it looked like she would not be at the LCS’s Leamington Spa offices for too long, with a contract taking her just to the end of the 2007.
This was when, it was thought, the government’s proposed Office for Legal Complaints (OLC) would take over. But after an eventful first year in office, Ms Evans looks set for a few more. The OLC is now slated to begin in 2010, and the one-time practice manager at Birmingham firm Anthony Collins says: ‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that slipped until 2011.’
The OLC will be based in the West Midlands, and LCS staff will in the main be transferred over to the new body. But Ms Evans’ task is not just to prepare the ground for the OLC; there is a big enough job in 2007 in getting a grip on complaints, of which around 18,000 are still received each year.
‘I’m interested in making the LCS fit for purpose for the next three or four years, because that’s an awfully long time for people to wait for the OLC to come along. As part of that, because a number of our caseworkers will then transfer across to the OLC, we would be interested to know about the sorts of things the OLC is planning to do. I would hate to do something that somebody else would then unpick.’
Publish and be damned?
Near the top of that list will be the controversial proposal to publish solicitors’ complaints records, about which an initial consultation has recently been held. The early signs are that consumers like the idea, but the profession will undoubtedly take more convincing.
There are some who think it will be impossible to publish such data with sufficient context to make it fair. But Ms Evans insists it can be done. ‘We need to give an indication of the size of the complaint so that people can differentiate between a complaint that led to a £15,000 settlement and one that led to a £50 settlement,’ she says. ‘We need to put number of complaints in context of the size of the firm, and we need to put timeframes on them so that people know how recent complaints are.’
There will be no kind of ‘scoring’ of a firm’s record – this would make the exercise more subjective when the point is to be objective. ‘We just want to give some straight information that doesn’t have any spin on it to help people make their minds up, and we would really shy away from trying to rate or rank firms, because that’s where potential unfairness comes in,’ she says.
Nonetheless, Ms Evans will not rule out including unsuccessful complaints in the tally – it could be, she says, that consumers will be told of the total number of complaints against a firm lodged at the LCS, with a column highlighting how many were unjustified.
Then there are concerns that including in the published records those complaints which are conciliated by the LCS – rather than going through the full adjudication process – could discourage solicitors from agreeing to a procedure which research shows consumers are far more comfortable with due to its speed and informality. Solicitors, by contrast, are happier in a more formal process, although around ten times as many complaints are conciliated as adjudicated.
However, Ms Evans hopes that solicitors would not shy away from conciliation, because the speed of the process works for them too. It also provides much more opportunity to maintain the relationship with the client. ‘If the downside of publishing complaints is that everything then goes through adjudication, it would be a step back for the consumer and solicitor,’ she says.
More than a name
The two main features of her first year have been the launch of the LCS and ongoing tensions with Zahida Manzoor, who holds the separate but related posts of Legal Services Ombudsman (LSO) and Legal Services Complaints Commissioner (LSCC) – the former considers complaints from those who feel that the LCS has not dealt with their cases adequately, while the latter oversees the operation of the LCS as a regulator. This has all been spiced up with events such as the LCS’s offices being hit by the July floods, the passage of the Legal Services Bill (which creates the OLC) and the ongoing furore over solicitors’ treatment of sick miners under the government’s coal health compensation scheme.
On this occasion, the change in name meant more than just a new logo and a PR offensive – it signified the separation of the ‘old’ Law Society’s regulatory and representative functions, although still technically under the umbrella of a corporate Law Society entity. ‘Early on, I could see potential for things to be difficult, but everybody has worked really hard on all sides to make it real,’ she says. ‘It must have been hard for some to let go, but they’ve done it.’ The main remaining issues are separating out the budget and cross-charging.
‘I think we’ve achieved more than operational independence,’ Ms Evans continues. ‘We’ve achieved strategic independence as well. We’ve had free rein to come up with our strategy and the Law Society, if anything, is working with us to deliver our improvement agenda. We’ve got further than many people probably thought we would have done.’
This independence of thought came to the fore earlier this year in the debate over whether the Legal Services Bill should give the OLC power to delegate the handling of complaints back to a frontline regulator. This has been one of the key issues for the Bar Council, which considers that it is solicitors’ poor handling of complaints that has brought the OLC down on barristers’ heads.
During the Bill’s passage through the House of Lords, the Law Society said it was content to see delegation for the bar, while being clear that it would not seek such a move for itself. The LCS, however, stood firmly against the idea on the basis that the OLC must be a one-stop shop for complaints against all lawyers. The government agreed. Ms Evans says she is largely pleased with the present shape of the Bill, and that her interest is now turning to the detail of how the OLC is set up.
Plan of action
When talking about complaints, however, Zahida Manzoor’s shadow looms large. While Ms Evans has painted an impressive picture over the past year of the LCS’s improved performance, Ms Manzoor has been far less effusive in her praise. In June, in her annual report as LSO, she branded the organisation as ‘still well short of where a modern, customer-focused organisation should be’.
Shortly before that, with her LSCC hat on, she issued a provisional decision that the LCS (and the Solicitors Regulation Authority) had not handled complaints in the year to 31 March 2007 in accordance with the plan submitted to her. She found that, though the LCS was dealing with complaints more quickly than before, the quality of its work was still well below par.
So, who should one believe? ‘Look at the evidence, look at the results and look at the improved performance,’ urges Ms Evans. ‘We didn’t deliver every element of the plan, but our view is that we’ve largely succeeded against it. From a consumer’s point of view, the most important thing is that, if they bring a complaint to us, they get the right answer as quickly as possible. It’s a combination of outcome and speed.’ She says the LCS’s own customer satisfaction surveys produce consistently high scores.
The quality targets are important because they measure process quality – consistency across caseworkers – but Ms Evans emphasises that, critically, they are not measuring the quality of outcome. ‘Don’t confuse it with being a measure of the accuracy of our decision-making, because it’s not,’ she says. ‘So, for example, we’re required to send a substantive update within 30 days. If the caseworker sends an update within 31 days, then it is automatically a fail, even if it is 30 days before the caseworker gets a piece of substantive information that they want to write about. It doesn’t necessarily mean the consumer had a bad service because we missed a target.’
One index that is undoubtedly a sign of quality of outcome, rather than just process, is the LSO satisfaction rating – that is, the percentage of cases where the LSO is happy with the way the LCS handled a case. Though performance has slowly improved over the years, it is still below the 73% target. Ms Evans acknowledges that this is ‘disappointing’, but explains that one major factor has been the LCS’s offer of ‘special payments’ in cases where it knows it has underperformed. She says the LCS is one of the few complaints-handling organisations to have such a policy, and that without it, the satisfaction rating would be higher – Ms Manzoor only has to decide that the amount of compensation was slightly inadequate for the file to count as a fail.
‘We are keen to get people delivering consistency,’ Ms Evans continues. ‘It’s not easy because they are obviously thinking, creative human beings, as you’d want them to be, and they make the calls that they think are right. One of the things we’re having to do is say “you need to do this on this day, regardless of whether the solicitor has said he’ll ring you back one day later, otherwise the file is going to fail”. There’s also the fact that with a file that goes on for six months, for example, you have six 30-day updates, and only have to miss one of them for the whole file to fail.’
The sum of all this is that the LCS is currently waiting to hear what Ms Manzoor will do. If she firms up her provisional view that the plan was not delivered – as seems likely – she will then have to decide whether to levy a penalty. ‘Our performance last year was really good – the best that the organisation has ever achieved – and I would be disappointed if a fine were to be levied,’ says Ms Evans. ‘I would fail to see how it is in the interests of the consumer, as it would demotivate an organisation that is motivated and enjoying dealing with customer complaints.
‘The role of an external regulator is to point out where an organisation is meant to improve, but a stick is appropriate if an organisation is failing. Encouragement is due where an organisation is improving.’
The other obvious frustration is the length of time the process is taking. The plan year ended six months ago and still the review is ongoing, with more rounds of the ‘representations process’ – where the LCS puts its case to the LSCC before she makes her decisions – still to come. In fact, it is almost time for the LCS to sit down with staff from the LSCC’s office to talk about agreeing the 2008/09 complaints-handling plan. Despite this, Ms Evans is at pains to point out that relations between the two have improved over the past year.
However, she has found the representations process protracted and resource intensive. ‘It would be really good if we could sit down with the office and work out a much quicker, proportionate and transparent way of working. Being in the representations process for last year is taking us away from some of the improvements we’d like to do this year, which is a shame.’
Water water everywhere
The 2007/08 targets are tougher than those of the previous year, and they would be hard enough to meet without various other problems the service has encountered, such as being flooded. This was not the first time it has happened, and so the LCS was prepared, but nonetheless it was closed for a day and half, immediately putting the targets at risk.
‘A day-and-a-half’s closure cost us 957 caseworker hours,’ she says. ‘Equally, on that day and a half, there would have been five-day acknowledgements due, 30-day updates due and so on. We recovered the situation as quickly as we could, so for example we had the team that does acknowledgements doing overtime. But it will impact on the number of closures at the end of month because that time was lost.’
The LCS has also suffered from pan-Law Society IT problems which have caused the loss of 3,000 caseworker hours. ‘I know IT problems can affect any business, but because ours is target-orientated, we find it hard to cope with large amounts of lost time.’ The targets are such that, once the LCS falls behind during the year, it will be hard to catch up. But Ms Evans remains bullish about this year’s performance.
Another pressure will be the increased caseload caused by the LCS’s efforts to contact miners to see if they may have a complaint against their solicitors over deductions from their damages. The pilot of this project in Rother Valley proved sufficiently successful for it to be rolled out, but it will be done incrementally so as not to overwhelm the service (see [2007] Gazette, 13 September, 4).
So has the miners compensation scandal affected the way Ms Evans views solicitors? Fortunately, the answer appears to be no. ‘A small number of firms let the profession down as part of the coal health claims handling and a small number of firms continue to let the profession down through not handling their complaints well,’ she says. ‘However, my view of the profession as a whole has been that most people are striving to do a good job – and that remains unchanged. I used to be a trading standards officer and so it would be wrong to say I’m surprised by what I see here, because I’ve seen it in so many other professions and organisations before.
‘The majority of the profession would benefit from knowing what we know about the underlying causes of complaints, ways of handling clients better and how to settle a complaint where one is brought. That’s one of the reasons we want to engage with solicitors this year to help them improve. I don’t want to be in a position of constantly criticising the profession if I’m not enabling them to work better.
‘Hopefully, in a few years time, there will be far fewer complaints coming out of the legal profession, which will be in everyone’s interests. As a whole, solicitors are doing a very good job, and if we can get this element right, the public should see them in a much better light.’
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