The Law Society and Legal Services Complaints Commissioner yesterday unveiled a package of client care measures to help solicitors, including a £100,000 ‘best practice’ consultancy service and a dedicated helpline.

Society chief executive Des Hudson described the initiative as an important step toward helping practitioners deal with what he expects to be a ‘radically different’ complaints-handling regime once the Office for Legal Complaints becomes fully operational by the end of 2010.

The £275,000 package constitutes a regulatory settlement between Chancery Lane and the commissioner, Zahida Manzoor, following her decision last June to fine the Society that sum after declaring its 2008/09 complaints-handling plan to be inadequate. The Society disagreed with the fine. This week’s settlement, approved by the Ministry of Justice, prevents the cash being lost to the Treasury.

The Society has committed £100,000 to establish a consultancy service that will involve recruiting 20 consultants across England and Wales. They will work alongside the Solicitors Regulation Authority to target about 200 firms it has identified that need help with complaints-handling.

A further £30,000 will go on setting up a new client care and complaints helpline. This will involve taking over Lawyerline, the Legal Complaints Service’s telephone helpline for solicitors, and relocating it to the Society’s helplines team, staffed by solicitors.

The third element of the package will see the Society make an additional £105,000 available to fund two extra places per year over five years on its diversity access scheme.

Chancery Lane will spend another £40,000 recruiting a client care manager to oversee the measures agreed with the commissioner.

Hudson said: ‘We are pleased the commissioner has accepted proposals from the Society to use the funds to promote diversity and excellence in the profession and improve client care.’

Manzoor commented: ‘I am delighted that the Law Society and I found a way forward. The timing of this initiative is right, with complaints-handling soon to be undertaken by the OLC. I am pleased that the Society is gearing up for that by devoting more resources to maintaining high standards.’

Hudson urged solicitors to prepare for the advent of the OLC. Complaints will remain a profession-wide issue, he stressed, since the application of the ‘polluter pays’ principle will be limited.

He expects OLC Chair Elizabeth France to pursue a ‘radically different’ model from the LCS regime, which is focused on written complaints and the application of a ‘quasi-court process – who’s right and who’s wrong’. France is keen to improve the system’s accessibility and speed, he added. This could mean that OLC staff will frame the basis for a complaint during a telephone conversation with a complainant and then email that basis to the respondent firm for comment.

‘Firms will be required to respond in a different way and to a different timescale,’ Hudson said. ‘We want to work in harmony with the OLC and Legal Services Board to educate the profession.’

  • The OLC has announced that its first chief ombudsman will be Adam Sampson, currently chief executive of the housing and homelessness charity Shelter. A former assistant prisons ombudsman, Sampson will take up the post on 1 July. See Opinion.