Society faces titanic battle with complaints

INTERVIEW: Legal Services Ombudsman Ann Abraham says the OSS can meet its targets

A damning report from the Legal Services Ombudsman (LSO) is not to be taken lightly at any time but especially not this year, given the pressure on the Law Society to clean up its act on complaints handling.For 12 months, the Society has been struggling to meet very exacting targets agreed with the Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine.

The verdict of LSO Ann Abraham in an interview with the Gazette this week, was that the struggle remains titanic, although she concedes that the Office for the Supervision of Solicitors (OSS) still has a fighting chance.Her most withering criticisms are directed not at the OSS, but at Law Society leaders for a lack of any perceptible strategy aimed at getting to the heart of the complaints-handling problem.

She concludes that 'it remains a real possibility' that the Lord Chancellor would use reserved powers to appoint a Legal Services Commissioner with powers to fine the Society for failure to meet targets.

On the most talked-about target - to reduce the backlog of complaints to 6,000 by December this year - Ms Abraham concludes that the OSS may squeak home.

'They might just get there on the figures - I would give them a faint tick,' she says.

However, she expresses grave concern about the quality of decision-making by caseworkers, pointing to the recent 5% decline in the number of cases in which her office was satisfied with the way the issues were handled.

Her figures show that 41% of cases referred to her office can be faulted on some ground.

Ms Abraham attributes this situation mainly to two things.

The first is pressure to clear the backlog.

She suspects that caseworkers may be pushing cases through at such a pace that they are missing obvious things.

However, she believes the lack of established quality frameworks for case-handling at the OSS means that complainants take 'pot luck' when their cases are allocated.Ms Abraham is highly critical of the Law Society for its failure to make any real progress on two targets she regards as pivotal: a client care programme for solicitors; and research into the attitudes of clients towards solicitors and of solicitors towards client care.

She acknowledges that there have been some worthwhile client care initiatives - training programmes for local law societies, for example - but she damns the 'lack of any overall coherence' in the client care strategy.

In particular, Ms Abraham sees no evidence of a strategy to feed the valuable information gleaned by the OSS about complaint patterns into the design of appropriate client care support programmes.In relation to research, she damns the 'extraordinary lack of progress'.

She adds: 'It is impossible to say with any authority how solicitors at large are performing or how the public assess that performance.

Progress cannot be measured until those baselines have been established.'Ms Abraham attributes the 'piecemeal, uncoordinated and painfully slow' nature of some of the initiatives to a lack of strategic direction at the highest level in Chancery Lane.

On the subject of the Legal Services Commissioner, Ms Abraham is extremely reticent, anxious to avoid any suggestion of personal ambition.

However, she believes the appointment of a commissioner 'remains a real possibility'.

That said, she stresses that 'the 'OSS has not failed yet' and with a new push from Chancery Lane and, importantly, no let up in financial investment, she believes that the problem could yet be solved.

Evlynne Gilvarry