The legal ombudsman will try to incentivise early resolution by raising case fees for practices whose complaint goes all the way to a final decision.
The Office for Legal Complaints, which oversees the ombudsman service, said it was responding to calls for radical changes to its case fee approach by increasing the cost of a final decision to £1,500. Cases which go to investigation will cost the legal service provider £750, but the fee for a case resolved early would be just £200.
Currently, the individual case fee is £400.
Even if complaints are resolved in the lawyer’s favour, case fees will be waived only if the ombudsman is satisfied that they took all reasonable steps to resolve the complaint at first tier.
An additional £400 fee will be levied on any legal services provider who did not issue a final response to a client’s complaint within eight weeks - irrespective of the eventual outcome of any investigation.
The OLC said the changes, subject to a consultation running through the summer, have the potential to drive ‘significant cultural change’ in the sector.
OLC chair Ric Blakeway said: ‘LeO’s experience shows that standards of complaint handling are not consistently meeting the level that customers of legal services should be able to expect. A single statistic points to the need for change: that one in four people who escalated their complaint to LeO in 2025/26 said they never received a final response from their provider. This is poor and preventable.’
The changes are also set to significantly bolster the ombudsman’s income stream: under the current regime LeO generated £940,000 in case fees in 2024/25 – 5% of the overall costs of providing the service.
If the proposed new case fee regime had been in place in 2024/25, the organisation could have generated nearly £3.5m in case fee revenue – about 20% of LeO’s costs for that year. All extra fee income will be used to offset the levy paid by the legal profession to fund the ombudsman.
LeO says demand for its service has increased significantly, with complaint volumes rising by 37% in 2025/26 alone. This growth is being driven by a combination of changing consumer expectations, issues with first-tier complaint handling, and wider societal trends, including the growing role of artificial intelligence tools. This amplifies the need for transformation in complaint handling, by both the legal sector and LeO itself.
As well as fee rises, the other major proposed changes are to restrict the use of the ombudsman service. One proposal is to require complainants to show evidence they have experienced any impact or detriment from the way they were treated. If this cannot be shown, then LeO will not accept the complaint for investigation.
The ombudsman wants to focus only on complaints where there has been a real impact on clients and make them easier to understand and investigate.
LeO wants to introduce a long-stop date of 12 years to exclude complaints where it is clear they cannot be investigated without significant extra resources. The expectation is that setting the long-stop date at 12 years provides complainants with a significant opportunity to bring complaints to LeO, while at the same time, giving providers a degree of certainty that very old complaints will not be investigated.
The OLC still wants to publish all final decisions and has worked on some of the barriers during the past year, but says a considerable amount of work remains to be done to ensure this can be done safely and accurately. Approving a revised policy is the first step on a path to full publication but this is unlikely to happen before 2027/28.
The consultation closes on 2 September.
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