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Complaints

Clarkslegal is committed to high quality legal advice and client care.  If you are unhappy about any aspect of the service you have received or about a bill, you are urged first to discuss it with the solicitor who is dealing with the matter.  However, if this is not appropriate, or fails to achieve a satisfactory result, please speak to the Partner who is supervising the case concerned, or the Partner you know best.

If you are still not satisfied with the outcome of your complaint you can refer it to our Complaints Partner, Antony Morris.  His email address is antony.morris@clarkslegal.com and his direct telephone number is +44118 960 4646.

On receipt of a complaint you should expect to receive an acknowledgment within two working days under normal circumstances, explaining the procedure to be followed and what will happen next.

On receipt of a complaint, a Partner in the work group concerned will be asked to investigate the complaint and to make a preliminary report.  That report will normally be completed within 7 days of the original complaint.  If, for some reason, it is either inappropriate or impractical for a Partner in the work group to investigate and make a report, it will be carried out by Antony Morris.

On receipt of that report, Antony Morris will then investigate the matter, including reviewing the file and speaking with the lawyers involved in the relevant work, and will then prepare a formal response to the complaint.  We aim to provide our written response to any complaint within 14 days from receipt of that complaint.  In some circumstances, for example in the event of holiday absences or in an involved matter, we may need longer, but in those circumstances we will give you a precise timescale.  We will never take longer than eight weeks to respond to a complaint.

We will also give consideration to involving more than one Partner in the review of a complaint, or referring the complaint to independent mediation with the agreement of the client.

The formal response to any complaint will inform the client of their rights to complain to the Legal Ombudsman in the following terms:

If you are not satisfied with our handling of your complaint, you may ask the Legal Ombudsman (whose contact details are set out below) to consider the complaint.  Normally, you will need to bring a complaint to the Legal Ombudsman within six months of receiving a final written response from us about your complaint or within six years of the act or omission about which you are complaining (or if outside of this period, within three years of when you should reasonably have been aware of it).

The Legal Ombudsman
PO Box 6806
Wolverhampton
WV1 9WJ

Phone: 0300 555 0333
Email: enquiries@legalombudsman.org.uk
Website: http://www.legalombudsman.org.uk

If you have a complaint about our behaviour or compliance with the The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) Rules you can raise that with the SRA. Details of the SRA Rules and and their contact information can be found at sra.org.uk

In relation to both contentious and non-contentious matters, you may also be entitled to have your charges reviewed by the Court. This is called “assessment”. The procedure is set out in sections 70-72 of the Solicitors Act 1974.