How does a solicitor react when he receives a letter from the Solicitors Complaints Bureau?It depends, I suppose, on how many such letters he is accustomed to receiving.

For some, no doubt, a billet doux from the bureau is a routine event to be dealt with in due course.

It is unlikely that the great majority of solicitors are so blase.On the contrary, a letter from the bureau is like the detonation of a grenade, producing shock waves of fear and apprehension.

For the profession, the SCB is associated with discipline, with misconduct, with rebukes and, ultimately, a trip to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal.

The idea that the bureau might or should or could be a friend and ally of solicitors would be thought ludicrous.This is why, when a solicitor receives a message from Leamington Spa, his reaction is to repel boarders at all costs.

A charge has been made against him and he sees it as his task to prove his innocence.

Eventually the bureau will rule in his favour (relief) or against him (gloom and despondency).All this, of course, represents a hopelessly misguided approach to complaints handling.

The Law Society's own research shows that only a very small minority of complainants are looking for compensation, or a reduction in their bills, or want the solicitor punished.

Most complainants want only that the solicitor 'should sort things out'.But 'sorting things out' is the very end which the present procedures are so ill adapted to achieve.

This may seem a surprising thing to say because according to the bureau's own figures only '11% of complaints are sent for adjudication ...

70% of complaints are dealt with informally, either under practice rule 15 or by conciliation'.

Do we not, therefore, already have a conciliation culture rather than an adversarial culture?Well, the conciliation culture may be there in intention, but that is not the perceived reality.

The simple fact is that many of the bureau's complainants remain disgruntled customers.

A number (whose files have been closed) express confusion about whether the bureau is still handling their complaint or not.

And, at the end of it all, the solicitor is likely to feel a sense of grievance even if the complaint has been rejected.

Why has he had to spend all this time in refuting the unfounded allegations of a troublemaker? The present system of complaints handling, therefore, pleases no one.

If the complaint is rejected, the client will see himself as defeated because of some technicality which he does not understand.

Or he will perceive bias (which is one thing that certainly does not exist).The solicitor against whom an adverse finding is made, on the other hand, will feel that he is being condemned by people who have no idea of the pressures and constraints on a high street practitioner, that an unreasonably rigorous standard has been applied against him.

But suppose he is 'acquitted'? In that event he will have achieved a very unsatisfactory kind of victory.

His aggrieved client will still go about telling his friends and acquaintances, 'Never use Messrs XYZ'.There are now moves afoot to 'reform' the SCB.

A consultation paper on the SCB issued by the Law Society makes various suggestions which in sum would amount to the creation of a mark II SCB.

In my view, this would be a profoundly unsatisfactory outcome.

Mark I or mark II we would be left with the same suspicion of pro-lawyer bias, the same hostility on the part of solicitors, the same probability that the end of the complaints-handling process would see both a dissatisfied solicitor and a disgruntled client.Clearly, what is needed is an entirely different attitude to complaints handling.

In my own response to the consultation paper I have suggested the abolition of the bureau altogether.

The bureau's regulatory and monitoring functions should be assumed by the Law Society under its own name (that is also the view of the Legal Services Ombudsman).Complaints handling, likewise, should be dealt with by the Law Society under the name of, say, 'The Law Society Client Care Unit'.

The client care unit would not concern itself with misconduct or incompetence save in clear and obvious cases or where the complainant had specifically raised misconduct or incompetence as an issue which he wanted investigated.

The advantage of the change of name would be that we would have abandoned the ambiguity inherent in a complaints-handling agency which was perceived neither as wholly a part of the Law Society nor as wholly extraneous to it.

Commercial organisations are not ashamed to be seen as trying to handle their complaints properly.

Neither should we.In the great majority of cases, the client care unit's concern would be to produce a satisfied customer.

In this objective it would need the co-operation of the solicitor and it would need to convince the solicitor that it is in his interest to give that co-operation.To give one example: in many cases where there is a complaint, say, of delay, the solicitor must be aware either that he has indeed been guilty of delay or alternatively that that is the client's reasonable perception.

A commercial organisation would simply own up, apologise and offer some discount in the final bill.

But the solicitor is reluctant to take this course.

If he does, is he not making himself available as a burnt offering, a naked victim for the exercise of the bureau's fearsome powers? But while attitudes like this continue to exist no conceivable complaints-handling system is going to produce either satisfied solicitors or satisfied customers.To produce a change in culture is, I believe, a primary task for the Law Society.