Conduct and service

Communication - the key word

Breakdowns in communication are at the root of a huge proportion of complaints to the Office for the Supervision of Solicitors (OSS) about quality of service.

Sometimes it is a failure to explain something to the client in terms that he can understand.

Often it is simply a failure to tell the client something he should have been told.

The latter is the most annoying, because the cause of complaint should have been easily avoided.

But another characteristic of such complaints is that they spawn other grievances, which may not themselves have any validity, but which now have to have time spent on them, trying to explain to the client why they are not justified.

By the time the complaint is aired, the client is usually convinced that his complaint is justified in every respect.

Therefore, he will not accept either the solicitor's explanation or the OSS's rejection of the unjustified complaints.

Even more time then has to be spent dealing with an appeal.

And it could all have been so easily avoided.

A prime example of this was a case involving an estate in which the executors were a solicitor and one of four children of the deceased.

The estate, which was not at all complex, took two years to distribute.

This was mainly because the beneficiaries - the four children - could not agree between them and one had been left an asset, the value of which fell to be deducted from their quarter share.

The complaint involved inadequate costs information, failure to reply to letters and telephone calls and delay in obtaining a valuation of the asset.

The only justified complaints were those relating to costs information and failure to reply to two letters.

The costs information involved failing to advise the co-executor of an increase in charge-out rate.

Three successive letters had been sent at fortnightly intervals, but the first two were not answered.

How annoying that these minor incidents - both of which should never have arisen - blew up into full-scale complaints to the OSS.

How much more annoying to have the other complaints tacked on.

The solicitors had not delayed getting the valuation - in fact they had obtained four, because the beneficiaries would not agree to the first three.

Even the co-executor, in an application for a remuneration certificate - yes, the escalation of the complaints involved that as well - said that telephone calls had been kept to a minimum to avoid additional costs.

She could not give dates when calls had been made and not dealt with, while the solicitor's file showed various telephone attendances.

Because the justified complaints, which could and should, have been easily avoidable, had been allowed to arise in the first place, the co-executor imagined all kinds of matters for which the solicitors, unfairly, got the blame.

Nothing could now convince the complainant otherwise.

Every case before the adjudication panel is decided on its individual facts.

This case study is for illustration only and should not be treated as a precedent