Complaints Policy & Procedure

 

We are committed to providing a high-quality legal service to all our clients. When something goes wrong we need you to tell us about it. This will help us to improve our standards.

 

Our complaints procedure

 

If you have a complaint, please contact our client relationship partner, in writing.

 

            Sital Patel, Stanmore Law Practice, 51/53 The Broadway, Stanmore, Middlesex, HA7 4DJ

 

What will happen next?

 

1. You will be sent a letter acknowledging your complaint and asking you to confirm or explain the details. You can expect to receive our letter within two days of us receiving your complaint.

2. We will record your complaint in our central register and open a file for your complaint. We will do this within a day of receiving your complaint.

3. We will then investigate your complaint.

4. We will ask the member of staff who acted for you to reply to your complaint. This will take up to five days from receipt of the details of the complaint from you.

5. If you are not satisfied with the reply to your complaint, we will refer the complaint to our Client Relationship Partner, Mrs Sital Patel who will send you a detailed reply to your complaint. This will include our suggestions for resolving the matter. This will happen within five days of Mrs Patel’s receipt of your complaint unless her investigations are likely to take longer, in which case she will write to you and inform you of the likely length of time in which she will be able to reply to your complaint.

6. At this stage, if you are still not satisfied you can contact us again. We will then arrange a review of our decision. This will happen in one of the following ways. 
   a.       Mrs Sital Patel will review her own decision within five days.
   b.       We will arrange for someone in the firm who has not been involved in your complaint to review it. They will do this within 10 days.

7. We will let you know the result of the review within five 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. If you are unhappy at the conclusion of our complaint process you have the right to complain to the Legal Ombudsman, an independent complaints body established under the Legal Services Act 2007 that deals with legal services complaints. The Legal Ombudsman can be contacted at PO Box 6806, Wolverhampton, WV1 9WJ, by telephone on 0300 555 0333, or be emailed at enquiries@legalombudsman.org.uk.  The Legal Ombudsman’s website is at http://www.legalombudsman.org.uk. 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 and in any event within one year of the act or omission about which you are complaining occurring, or one year from the date when the complainant should have realised that there was cause for complaint.

 

Alternative complaints bodies (such as Ombudsman Services, whose website is at 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. It is our Firm’s policy not to agree to use such Ombudsman Services.

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If we have to change any of the timescales above, we will let you know and explain why.

 

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