Complaints Policy

We are committed to providing a high quality legal service to all of our clients. Our definition of a ‘complaint’ is any expression of dissatisfaction – so when something is wrong we need you to tell us about it. This will help us to continually monitor and improve our standards. This also includes complaints about your Bill.

Complaints Procedure

If you have a complaint, please contact us with the details. In the first instance, this should be to our Practice Manager, Sam Mellor, either by email to: sam.mellor@baileysmailes.co.uk or by letter to our Huddersfield office, at 6/8 New North Parade, HD1 5JP. Your complaint will be recorded in our central register, a separate file opened and the progress of the complaint monitored throughout.

What will happen next?

We will send you a letter acknowledging your complaint, enclosing a copy of this procedure and we will also let you know the name of the person who will be dealing with your complaint. You can normally expect to receive our letter within five working days of us receiving your complaint.
We will then investigate your complaint. This will usually involve passing your complaint to Dominic Hirst, our client care Director, within 5 working days. (In his absence, this may have to be extended accordingly, or passed to another Director). Mr Hirst will investigate the complaint with the member of staff who acted for you and make an initial response within a further 10 working days.
Mr Hirst may invite you to a meeting to discuss and, hopefully, resolve your complaint. If necessary, he will do this within a further 3 working days.
Within 5 working days of any meeting, Mr Hirst will write to you to confirm what took place and the solutions agreed with you.
If you do not want a meeting or it is not appropriate, Mr Hirst will send you a detailed reply to your complaint. This will include suggestions for resolving the matter and will be done within 5 working days of completing the investigation or within 25 working days of sending the acknowledgement, whichever is the sooner.
At this stage, if you are still not satisfied you can contact us again. We will then arrange to review our decision. This will happen in one of the following ways:
- Another Director of the firm will review the decision, within 5 working days;
- We can ask our local Law Society or another firm of Solicitors to review your complaint, within 5 working days. We will let you know how long this process will take;
- We will invite you to agree to independent mediation, within 5 working days. We will also let you know how long this process will take.
We will inform you of the result of any review, within 5 working days of the end of the review. At this time we will write to you confirming our final position on your complaint and explaining our reasons for it.
If still unresolved at this stage, you may take the complaint to the Legal Ombudsman (LeO) or, in accordance with the Alternative Dispute Resolution Regulations, to an Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) Scheme Provider. We will issue a final letter advising you of this.

LEGAL OMBUDSMAN

The Legal Ombudsman is the independent body established by the Office for Legal Complaints under the Legal Services Act 2007, to deal with complaints against Solicitors.

The Legal Ombudsman may:

Investigate the quality of professional service supplied by a solicitor to a client
Investigate allegations that a solicitor has breached rules of professional conduct
Investigate allegations that a solicitor has unreasonably refused to supply a professional service to a prospective client
Investigate allegations that a solicitor has persistently or unreasonably offered a professional service that the client does not want

Before it will consider a complaint, the Legal Ombudsman generally requires that the firm’s internal Complaints Procedure (outlined above) has been exhausted. If the Legal Ombudsman is satisfied that the firm’s proposals for resolving a complaint are reasonable, it may decline to investigate further. You will have to bring your complaint to the Legal Ombudsman within 6 months of receiving a final response from us about your complaint. The Legal Ombudsman expects complaints to be made to them within a year of the date of the act or omission about which you are concerned or within a year of you realising there was a concern.

The Legal Ombudsman’s address and contact details are:

PO Box 6167, Slough SL1 0EH;
telephone, 0300 555 0333;
website, www.legalombudsman.org.uk;
email, enquiries@legalombudsman.org.uk

THE SOLICITORS REGULATION AUTHORITY

The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) can help you if you are concerned about our behaviour. This could be for things like dishonesty, taking or losing your money or treating you unfairly because of your age, a disability or other characteristic.

You can raise your concerns with the Solicitors Regulation Authority @ www.sra.org.uk/consumers/problems/report-solicitor.page

ALTERNATIVE DISPUTE RESOLUTION SCHEMES

Alternative complaints bodies (such as Ombudsman Services www.ombudsman-services.org/ ) exist which are competent to deal with complaints about legal services should both you and our firm wish to use such a scheme.

However, we don’t currently agree to use this Alternative Dispute Resolution service in view of the availability of the independent Legal Ombudsman Service established under the Legal Services Act 2007. We are bound by our Regulatory Code to comply with the Legal Ombudsman.

CONTRACTS ENTERED INTO ONLINE

If we are unable to resolve your complaint which relates to a contract entered into online, you may contact the Online Dispute Resolution providers by accessing the following link http://ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr