And they're off!

There was some speculation about how the first few days and weeks at the Legal Ombudsman would fly. Once the consultation, design, planning, procurement, recruitment, training and testing '“ all the dry, dull but essential preparations for launch were done '’ the new Legal Ombudsman has finally opened for business. And lots of business at that.

We had always anticipated that the office would be busy. But we did now know how busy. The best estimate was that some 80,000 people used contact the complaints bodies every year. So we set our expectations at 100,000 and installed systems which could handle up to 165,000. Demand is currently running higher than we anticipated '“ at about 120,000 a year '“ but these are very early days and once the initial burst of publicity which accompanied our launch dies away, we expect our workload to stabilise more at the levels we predicted.

With the few thousands of contacts flowing in already, we are starting to see some of the meat, the nub of what concerns people about legal services, come through. So we have now had a short time to contemplate what LeO now represents. Before we opened, we received many questions about what would be different and what our approach would be.

The answer boils down to a simple and appealing point '’ bringing all aspects of the legal profession under one roof is a key structural reform for everyone, consumers and the profession as a whole. On go-live day, the new organisation not only replaced the existing Legal Services Ombudsman but the Legal Complaints Service too, sweeping away the existing methods of handling service complaints for the entire legal profession (unlike the LCS, the new organisation can also take complaints about legal executives, licensed conveyancers, barristers, patent attorneys etc.) and now offers a one-stop shop for anyone seeking to make a complaint about a lawyer.

Keeping it simple

For consumers, it simplifies the process enormously. We now have a bank of the thousands of calls that we have already received in which people have told us that they weren't sure what to do or where to go until they heard of us. And we have had at least one case where a consumer wasn't sure how it worked between a solicitor and a barrister. But we are working hard at making sure we provide an effective service that helps explain the sometime complicated legal landscape. Of the thousands of contacts we receive, our process of redirection to other bodies accounts for something like 20 per cent of our initial work. The bulk of the rest really do have a complaint about the legal service they have received.

But are those complaints about lawyers? The Legal Services Act, which set up the new regulatory and complaints handling arrangements, was very specific about who was, and was not, a lawyer and what was, and was not, an act which only a lawyer could perform. If it is a complaint about one of those 'official' lawyers, we can take it.

But not all legal activity is carried out by lawyers. Conveyancing, will writing, divorce '“ all can be done by people with no legal qualifications and who are not regulated by anyone. This isn't a judgment about quality or professionalism '“ just a confusing quirk to a system that was intended to simplify and clarify.

Already, complaints have included: a foreign firm based in England offering conveyancing for people wishing to buy homes abroad; a will-writing firm owned by a solicitor separate from his own business; an online divorce portal staffed by non-lawyers 'supervised' by an expert panel of solicitors '“ all of these have been subject of complaints and all have argued that they do not come under our aegis. Whether their claims are correct is a matter for debate; what is not is that there will be some legal services which complainants have brought which fall outside our remit.

But that is just the punters. Equally important will be the experience of the lawyers who are the subject of their complaints. Hopefully too, the fact of our existence has also made it easier for you, lawyers, working to provide advice and counsel to clients every day. Our first resolved case '“ opened and closed in four working days '“ goes some way to illustrating what we hope the ombudsman can represent.

This case started as a call from a man who wanted to complain about the lawyer dealing with his tribunal. The lawyer had adjourned the case on four separate occasions '“ seemingly without letting his client know. The latest hearing was scheduled for late October, and the lawyer wanted to delay that hearing until December. This was an adjournment too far for our caller, who told the lawyer he wanted his file back and money returned. He heard nothing back following his request. We called the solicitor involved, and, upon hearing of our involvement, the lawyer returned his client's file and the money owed.

There are many things we want LeO to be '“ and quick is among our aspirations '“ but this case strikes a different chord, as it seems to illustrate what many of you told us in the months up to opening: sometimes things go wrong, and, usually, lawyers are keen to put things right.

An appeal mechanism

Which brings me on to what seems to be the largest single reason why we will refuse to accept a complaint for immediate investigation '“ the complainant has not yet given the lawyer the chance to sort the matter out. The new scheme is not a first-stage complaints handler; it is an appeal mechanism. The central concept behind the change is that complaints handling is the responsibility of the lawyer providing the service; it is only if the lawyer fails to satisfy the person complaining '“ and you have an eight-week window to do that '“ that LeO's work begins. For most lawyers, the only direct contact you will have with us is when we send you an email telling you that someone has contacted us with a complaint and we have redirected them back to you so that you can sort it out.

So, of the 100,000 contacts, only about 15-20,000 will actually turn into cases which will immediately be accepted into the new scheme. This is where our real direct contact with the lawyer begins. And, if the patterns of our first few cases continues, and our presence is the reminder needed of what is the right thing to do to resolve a complaint, then we will be content with our role, and hope this will also be accepted by you.

And you have told us that we are. What is not heard among the small controversies that inevitably associated themselves with our launch was the quiet welcome we received from the profession. More than we could have hoped for, we have received good luck messages from firms, and a high demand for information about how we work and how to tell clients about us. For us this is heartening. The new scheme is not just a change of name and it is easy to only hear those voices that air their concerns and trepidation, possibly only at the thought of the unknown.

We have said we wish to bring about a very different approach to complaint handing. For a start, as an ombudsman scheme, we are a lay organisation taking a defiantly non-legal approach to the investigation of complaints with a strong accent on customer service. The emphasis of the new arrangements will be on speed and informality, with an emphasis on settling complaints by agreement rather than quasi-judicial process. Of course, if agreed resolution is not possible, one of the team of eight ombudsmen will make a decision (a decision which, once accepted by the complainant, is legally binding on both sides). But that decision will not be based on legal precedent or regulation but on a judgment on fairness and the adequacy of the service provided.

Over to you

Our powers and expectations are also very different. The new ombudsman scheme certainly has teeth: it can order up to £30,000 redress and has a statutory power to compel cooperation. But it will eschew simple judgments of right and wrong, preferring instead to seek to understand whether the level of service provided was adequate and looking not to punish, but merely to put customers who have had inadequate service back in the position which they should have been. It will also examine how the law firm handled the initial complaint when it was first raised with them.

Inevitably, there will also be a financial impact: the new service is paid for by the profession itself via a combination of a levy (collected through the practising certificate) and a case fee of £400 charged for eachcomplaint accepted for investigation. The latter cost, however, will only be incurred when a firm has had at least two complaints in the previous 12 months, a deliberate attempt on the part of the Legal Ombudsman to soften the impact on small firms and sole practitioners.

For once, however, this represents good rather than bad financial news. One of the huge advantages of the new arrangements is that they are cheaper than the old ones: the new scheme will cost only £20m a year to run instead of the £32m that it cost to run all the previous bodies, of which the LCS was just one. That is the background, at least. It is still early days for the new scheme and, although a large handful of cases have now been successfully settled by informal resolution, none has yet gone all the way through to an Ombudsman's decision.

Nor have we yet had enough time to start the process of trawling through the thousands of cases we will see to try to identify the common themes behind them. The new scheme is not merely a way of getting individual complaints resolved more quickly and more cheaply than before. It will also provide an important body of learning for lawyers about what customers believe is commonly going wrong in the profession. If the future of legal services is to be fought on the territory of price and customer service, the more the profession learns about how to keep customers happy now, the better.

Finally, we want to continue to hear from you. The Legal Services Act gives the LeO the power to publish reports of our investigations and decisions. We have recently launched a consultation looking at what sort of public information we should publish in the future. We have looked at precedents set by existing ombudsman schemes in other comparable professions and will be holding some consultation events around the UK over the next few weeks. We hope you will be able to join us and give us your views.

Bringing all legal complaints under one roof and making the system simpler has been the real difference we have seen over the last week. We have felt the sense of relief from callers telling us that we are easy to find and easy to understand. We have been able to reassure others and help them through a complex process to achieve a fair and reasonable outcome. It seems that eight into one does go.