Law Society sent warning over OSS

COMPLAINTS: the legal profession is once again threatened with losing self-regulation

The government fired a warning shot across the Law Society's bows this week, expressing 'grave concern' over its ability to deal with complaints properly.

David Lock, parliamentary secretary at the Lord Chancellor's Department (LCD), said the Law Society was not dealing with cases fast enough.

'The quality of the work that [the Office for the Supervision of Solicitors] is doing is not high enough and they are not turning around the new cases quickly enough,' he warned.

Mr Lock added that there should be an ethos of client care in the profession so that there 'were fewer complaints in the first place'.The warning renewed conjecture that the profession might lose the right to self-regulate if the situation failed to improve dramatically by the end of the year.

The government has power to appoint an independent complaints commissioner.The Law Society hit back immediately at what it called 'unjustified criticism' and confirmed that it was determined to reach agreed targets on case backlogs of 6,000 by December.

Figures released this week show that despite poor performance in April and May, the backlog had been reduced by 374 cases last week, bringing the backlog down to 11,600 this month.However, the OSS fell 10% below quality standard targets of dealing with 64% of cases to the LegalService Ombudsman's satisfaction.

In addition, in May only 31% of cases were dealt with within three months and 41% within five months, falling short of the targets of 90% and 100%.Law Society President RobertSayer said: '[The LCD] knows how committed we are to solving these problems and we are disappointed that we are being attacked on issues that simply don't exist.' He added: 'We are on target and doing our best.'OSS director Jim Wagstaffe said it was time for the Law Society and the OSS to 'grasp the nettle' and increase the use of sanctions, and to introduce compulsory customer care and practice management training.He said the OSS would make greater use of its powers to inspect firms with bad complaints records and would seek to recoup its costs from firms which fail to deal with complaints properly in-house.

Sue Allen