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I am all for clients who are let down with a service making a complaint, in fact I encourage it. We learn by mistakes and solicitors are not immune. We always send details of our complaints procedure to our clients and follow it if needed. Thankfully, we have had no major complaints, just clients feeling let down a little by speed of service etc. Those can be dealt with by having a frank discussion and where necessary refunding part of the bill and learning from your error and giving staff training where needed.

However, others are right. Even if you speak to a client at the outset and tell them their best possible outcome is not likely to be entirely to their liking as the law is simply not going to assist them to get what they want, if they then don't get what they want, they think it's your fault! They want to blame somebody, and hey ho, who is the easiest target? Yes, you're right - the solicitor who has kindly provided them with a whole range of ways to complain.

So, valid complaints - bring them on, I'm grateful for the opportunity to learn. But those that are simply wanting to blame somebody else - those people my mum used to refer to as those who 'think the world owes them a living' - they need to be weeded out and not noted as part of any equation.

The last time I dealt with the Ombudsman it was a client who complained that we had overcharged and had spoken to his tenant when he had told us not to. What had he engaged us to do? Evict his tenant. How he expected us to do that without communication I've no idea. We also provided a quote and a breakdown of our bill, even as an ex gratia gesture cutting some off but he still wasn't happy as he said he couldn't understand how we'd broken the bill down and why he had to pay for making a telephone call to us as it wouldn't appear on our telephone bill. I explained that it was the time taken to deal with the telephone call that we were billing. He didn't think that was fair. Thankfully, the Ombudsman took an entirely sensible viewpoint and dismissed the complaint but it took me hours of billable time wasted to deal with it.

I can foresee many more wasted billable hours in my future. Ah well...