COMPLETING THE INVESTIGATIVE JIGSAWIn 1996, Islington Borough Council in London commenced, and successfully concluded, repossession proceedings against Mr B.

Mr B blamed his solicitors for the result.

In particular, he claimed that they had not told him about an important interlocutory hearing on 15 November 1996.

He considered that his non-attendance at that hearing had been critical to the eventual outcome of the proceedings.The Office for the Supervision of Solicitors (OSS) put the complaint to the solicitors who explained that not only had Mr B attended their office on 14 November 1996 in order to give instructions for the hearing the next day but he had actually been present in court.

The solicitors were able to support their version of events with attendance notes which confirmed that Mr B had indeed attended on 14 November.

This was not, therefore, a case of the OSS simply taking the solicitors' word for it, nor indeed of the solicitors expecting it to.

Those days have gone.

Mr B insisted, however, that his version was correct: he had, he admitted, attended a hearing on 11 November but certainly not on 15 November.

The OSS persevered with their investigation.It discovered that it was at the hearing on 11 November that the court date of 15 November had been fixed.

It was difficult therefore to see how Mr B could not have known about it.

The final piece in the evidential jigsaw was provided when the solicitors produced a copy of an affidavit which Mr B had sworn at court on 15 November 1996.

The OSS dismissed Mr B's complaint and the ombudsman concluded that its decision to do so had been entirely justified.The OSS investigation had taken, in all, 12 months to complete.

The issues had hardly been complex.

Yet there was no indication of any protracted delay on its part and it had kept Mr B informed of progress throughout.

The comprehensive investigation of even quite straightforward complaints can take time.

In this case the OSS, with the co-operation of a helpful firm of solicitors, had put all the pieces together to create a clear picture of the rather doubtful merits of Mr B's complaint.

It could hardly have done more.COMPLAINTS AND THE COURTSMr P was no stranger to litigation.

He had, some years ago, instructed solicitors in respect of all sorts of things: a dispute with his neighbour, a personal injury claim and two professional negligence claims against firms of solicitors.

In 1991, he complained to the Solicitors Complaints Bureau (SCB) about poor service and advice given by his latest solicitors.

The SCB had difficulty in starting an investigation because much of the litigation complained about was still continuing and release of the solicitors' files was likely to cause additional delay.

On top of that, the solicitors were nervous about releasing their files before their own quite considerable charges had been paid.

It was not until June 1993 that the solicitors handed over to the bureau all the relevant files.

No sooner had they done so than the SCB discovered that the solicitors had commenced proceedings against Mr P for their outstanding costs of £21,000.

Since Mr P had pleaded in his defence nearly all the matters about which he had complained to the SCB, it was not possible for the SCB to investigate further, if at all, until the court case was over.Finally, in March 1996, Mr P told the SCB that the case against the solicitors had been settled on the basis that they would reduce their costs from £21,000 to just less than £7,000.

When the OSS concluded, not surprisingly, that the settlement adequately disposed of the issues, Mr P referred his case to the ombudsman on the basis that he had ended up in court over a dispute with his solicitors which the profession itself should have resolved.An allegation of that sort is a serious matter which brings into question the entire edifice of self-regulation.

The ombudsman, therefore, examined in some detail the reasons for the postponement of the investigation by the SCB.

It was clear that the SCB (and later the OSS) had in fact been drawn into a dispute which both parties were rightly willing to pursue through the courts.The pleadings clearly disclosed matters of law and fact which were more likely to be disposed of comprehensively in the course of civil proceedings than through the necessarily more limited complaints handling process.

The financial value of the respective claims was quite substantial and in any event far in excess of the OSS £1,000 compensation limit.

Although it was understandable that Mr P should argue that the quite considerable financial remedy provided by the courts should have been pre-empted by effective self-regulation, the ombudsman concluded that his expectations of the complaints handling process were not realistic.

The OSS finds itself at a rather uncomfortable juncture between the legal and the regulatory process.

The ombudsman concluded that its reticence had, on this occasion, been warranted in the interests of fairness.