Engaging with the complaints process

No one likes to be on the receiving end of criticism, and they certainly don’t like to be complained about.

This is true of everyone, whether it’s a personal or a professional matter, but in the event of someone making a complaint against a solicitor, it’s essential to engage with the complainer and their concerns at the outset. Trying to resolve an issue at the first opportunity is often the best way to resolve things to both your and the complainer’s satisfaction.

However where an issue can’t be resolved directly and the complainer wants to take the issue further, they can raise their complaint with the Scottish Legal Complaints Commission (SLCC) who will consider if the complaint is eligible. In addition to acting as the gateway for all legal complaints in Scotland, the SLCC can also investigate issues of service and can apply sanctions or make compensation awards to clients for service complaints.

Where a complaint is being considered by the SLCC, a solicitor’s professional obligations include engaging with the formal complaint process. This means promptly providing the SLCC, or ourselves in a conduct case, with the information required to fully investigate the complaint to ensure that there is a fair outcome based on the facts of the matter and to minimise delay to the process.

The Law Society and the SLCC have statutory powers to require a solicitor to cooperate and provide them with information, including files and documents. If a solicitor doesn’t cooperate, the SLCC or Society can go to court to enforce those powers – as the SLCC did successfully in a recent case. This undoubtedly would have caused additional stress, costs and delay to both the person who had raised the complaint originally, and also to the solicitor involved.

Refusing to engage in the process means not only delaying the complaint process, but could also risk an additional conduct complaint being brought by the Society itself. This could ultimately lead to a professional misconduct hearing before the independent Scottish Solicitors’ Discipline Tribunal – whether or not the original complaint was a service or conduct issue.

Solicitors are highly trusted and respected professionals. Recent research shows exceptionally high satisfaction rates of solicitors’ clients, with 93% saying they were satisfied with the service they had received. It illustrates real confidence among the public in the work of the legal profession.

Given the millions of individual cases and transactions solicitors are involved in, complaints represent a tiny proportion of the work carried out by the profession overall. However on those rare occasions when something does go wrong, it is essential that our members continue to meet their professional standards and obligations throughout the complaints process – and the majority do.

Solicitors’ working lives can be extremely pressurised and dealing with a complaint will undoubtedly be an additional stress and potentially very distressing. A solicitor who is going through the complaints process may choose to appoint independent representation to handle their case or seek support during this time. There is information about some of the support and resources available to our members via Lawscot Wellbeing, including the legal charity Lawcare which runs a helpline to provide support and advice for anyone in the legal community who is experiencing difficulties in their professional or personal lives.

It’s vital that the public can continue to trust the profession, the standards that they operate to and that they can be assured that there is a fair and robust regulatory regime that offers protection when things do go wrong. Regulation – and engaging promptly in any regulatory process – is an important part of safeguarding the profession’s reputation, alongside the hard work of solicitors themselves in delivering high quality advice and services for their clients.