We are committed to providing a quality legal service to all our clients.  Consequently, it is essential, when something goes wrong or any client believes that they have reason to complain, that we have an effective procedure to bring about an early resolution of the problem.  Only by doing so can we hope to maintain the quality standards we have set and improve them by learning from what may have gone wrong and what our clients tell us.

The person with overall responsibility for complaints in the firm is the Client Care Partner, Antony Schiller.

The Procedure

Please provide details of your concerns in writing (if you have not already done so) and send them to the Client Care Partner as follows:

By Post:           Client Care Partner, Dennings Solicitors, 164 Halesowen Street, Rowley Regis B65 0ES

By Email:         feedback@denningssolicitors.co.uk

By Hand:         to our office at the above address

If this would cause you difficulty, please let us know and we will make other arrangements for you to be able to explain your complaint to us.

What will happen next

1.         We will register your complaint (for monitoring and management information purposes).

2.         Within 5 working days of us receiving your complaint, we will acknowledge receipt of it and set out our understanding of it.  Please let us know if we have misunderstood your complaint in any way. We will confirm who will deal with your complaint and we will give you an estimate of how long we expect our investigation to take and when you can expect a response. We are allowed by the Legal Ombudsman a period of eight weeks in which to respond to a complaint. In practice it is very unusual for a response to take this long.

3.     We will then investigate your complaint.  This will usually involve the following steps:

        a)    We will ask the lawyer who acted for you to provide us with their view on your complaint.

        b)    We will then examine their response and the file and, if necessary, discuss the matter further with the lawyer.

        c)    We will consider your complaint in the light of what the file reveals and the lawyer’s response.

4.         We will then write to you with a detailed response and, if we accept that your complaint is justified, we will tell you what we propose by way of remedy.

5.         If you remain dissatisfied at the end of our complaints process, provided you are an individual or a “micro-enterprise”[1], you are at liberty to contact the Legal Ombudsman, whose address is PO Box 6167, Slough SL1 0EH.

The Legal Ombudsman’s telephone number is 0300 555 0333. The email address is enquiries@legalombudsman.org.uk.  The website is at www.legalombudsman.org.uk. 

The Legal Ombudsman is the statutory body to which you may refer your complaint, once we have concluded our professional obligation to try to resolve it.  The time limit for you to make a complaint to the Legal Ombudsman is six months from our final response to the complaint. It must also be within one year of the date of the event complained of, or if you only became aware of the issue at a later date, within one year of you becoming aware of the issue.

Alternative dispute resolution (ADR) bodies exist which are competent to deal with complaints about legal services should both you and we wish to use such a scheme. Such a body is ProMediate (https://www.promediate.co.uk). We have, however, chosen not to adopt an ADR process. If, therefore, you wish to complain further, you should contact the Legal Ombudsman.

Complaining to the Solicitors Regulation Authority

If your complaint is about our behaviour as opposed to our service, you can approach the SRA. 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.

Visit their website at https://www.sra.org.uk/consumers/problems/report-solicitor/  to see how you can raise your concerns with the Solicitors Regulation Authority.

[1] Micro enterprises are defined as enterprises which employ fewer than 10 persons and whose annual turnover or annual balance sheet total does not exceed 2 million euro. (Article 1 and Article 2(1) and (3) of the Annex to Commission Recommendation 2003/361/EC, as that Recommendation had effect at the date it was adopted.) This definition stands, even though we are no longer in the EU.