Our complaints policy

We are committed to providing a high quality legal service to all our clients.

We are also committed to having good professional working relationships with Counsel, other solicitors, the LAA and third parties.

We comply with our Equality and Diversity Policy regarding the provision of services and the instruction of Third Parties.

When something goes wrong we need you to tell us about it.  This will help us to improve our standards.

Our complaints procedure

If at any point you become unhappy with the service we provide or a bill that we have rendered, or both, please inform us immediately so that we can do our best to resolve the problem for you.

The person to contact is
Andrew Gibson
Carter Osborne Limited
59 Midland Road
Wellingborough
Northants
NN8 1HF
01933 273400
andrew.gibson@carterosborne.co.uk

What will happen next?

We will send you a letter acknowledging your complaint and may ask you to confirm or explain the details set out.  You can expect to receive our letter within four working days of the receipt of your complaint.  We will enclose a copy of this procedure.

Your complaint will be recorded in our central register and a file will be attached to your case file.  We will do this within a day of receiving your complaint.

We will then start to investigate your complaint.  This may involve one or more of the following steps:

• asking the member of staff who acted for you to reply to your complaint;
• Examining their reply and the information in your complaint file. They may then be asked for more information.

We will invite you to a meeting to discuss and hopefully resolve your complaint.  This will be done within fifteen working days of sending you the acknowledgement letter.

Within two days of the meeting Andrew will write to you to confirm what took place and any solutions agreed with you.

If you do not want a meeting or it is not possible Andrew will send you a detailed reply to your complaint.  This will include our suggestions for resolving the matter.  This will happen within fifteen working days of sending you the acknowledgement letter.

At this stage, if you are still not satisfied you can contact us again.  We will then arrange for another Director to review the decision.

We will write to you within 8 working days of receiving your request for a review confirming the final position on your complaint and explaining the reasons.

If the timescales for any of the above need to be changed we will let you know and explain why.

If we are unable to resolve your complaint using our internal complaints process you can have your complaint independently looked at by the Legal Ombudsman. The Legal Ombudsman investigates complaints about service issues with lawyers.

Legal Ombudsman at PO Box 6806, Wolverhampton WV1 9WJ
www.legalombudsman.org.uk
Tel: 0300 555 0333 or 0121 245 3050
Email: enquiries@legalombudsman.org.uk to consider the complaint.

There are time limits within which complaints must be made to the Legal Ombudsman, as indicated below.

The Legal Ombudsman expects complaints to be made to them within one year of the date of the act or omission about which you are concerned or within one year of you realising there was a concern. You must also refer your concerns to the Legal Ombudsman within six months of our final complaint to you.

Alternative complaints bodies such as ProMediate exist which are competent to deal with complaints about legal services should both you and our firm wish to use the scheme.

We do/do not agree to use ProMediate.

If the complaint is about Andrew Gibson then all of the same procedures above apply save that Liam Muir will deal with the matter.  He can be contacted on his email liam.muir@carterosborne.co.uk.