CCS: chairman vows to deal with solicitors dragging their feet over complaints

The Law Society's Consumer Complaints Board aims to blaze a trail for the future office for legal complaints (OLC) in areas such as issuing consumer warnings, allowing affected third parties to complain and speeding up the payment of compensation, its chairman revealed this week.


In his first interview since the board, which has a lay majority, took on oversight of the Consumer Complaints Service (CCS), Professor Shamit Saggar also saw value in fast-tracking serial offenders against client care rules to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal and imposing stronger penalties on solicitors who drag their feet in dealing with the CCS.


Prof Saggar said that 'as chairman, I must think in OLC terms' ahead of it subsuming the board and CCS when the government's legal services reforms kick in, probably in 2008. He said he has to do this partly to send the message that the board is independent and partly 'to do the big thinking' about ways to improve complaints-handling.


Prof Saggar is a professor of political science at Sussex University who has held a range of public appointments. He said the board 'should be in a position to say [to the public] that a particular category of legal service or product is causing consumer detriment', and that consumers should take care.


He would also like to see affected third parties - such as beneficiaries to a will where the client is technically the executor - being allowed to make complaints, and to have the CCS pay out compensation to successful complainants to cut out delay and then recoup it from the solicitors. Part of the board's role is 'to show [the OLC] that something like that works', he explained.


On fast-tracking firms to the tribunal, Prof Saggar said: 'In any comparable area, that kind of fast-tracking has usually been associated with better outcomes for both consumers and practitioners.'


Prof Saggar recognised that the independence of his board may be lost on the general public, who will simply see it as still part of the Law Society, although he emphasised that it matters to stakeholders, such as the government. However, he said consumers may notice 'a much greater degree of realism' from the board in areas such as not allowing solicitors to draw out CCS enquiries.


'Too much time is spent with a small bunch of solicitors who are stringing it out,' Prof Saggar said. 'We do have to think about higher penalties [for this].'


Another improvement would be the quicker allocation of complaints to CCS caseworkers with capacity to handle them, he said, as once a case has begun working through the system, it is working well.


It is acknowledged that complaints-handling has improved significantly since a low point around 2000. 'If the board had come on stream two years ago, it would have been a different story,' he said. 'But we are now on an upward swing.'


Yet solicitors might fear that with non-lawyers in charge, their interests will be lost. This is not the case, Prof Saggar insisted. 'The profession's leaders know we are serious but they also know we are grown up. The message is one of balance.'