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A swingeing £250,000 fine has been imposed on the Law Society by the watchdog Legal Services Complaints Commissioner, Zahida Manzoor, for failing to manage its Consumer Complaints Service adequately. It follows the submission by the Law Society of it’s latest “action plan” to improve complaints handling, and which apparently fell far short of the Commisioner’s requirements.

 

According to Ms Manzoor "The Law Society has failed to include in its plan all of my targets at the levels set. For example, I have yet to be convinced why the time that consumers have to wait to receive a letter, setting out the main points of their complaint, cannot be reduced from three months to at least two." She went on "I need to mark the failures in the plan with an appropriate level of penalty. I have concluded that a penalty of a quarter of a million pounds is appropriate."

 

The fine, which is unprecedented, is the culmination of months of increasingly acrimonious discussion over the Law Society’s targets for the handling of complaints from the public.

Ms Manzoor was appointted Legal Services Complaints Commissioner in February 2004 in addition to her role as Legal Services Ombudsman, which she took up in March of 2003.

 

As Commissioner she has to set targets with the society over how it handles complaints. Almost from the start of her period in office Ms Manzoor has made the Law Society the main target of her attentions, regularly lambasting them for failing to handle complaints quickly enough, and for failing to address the main causes of complaints - which she lists as; excessive delays, excessive costs, poor responsiveness to communications, failure to follow instructions, failure to act in the client’s best interest and failure to clarify the implications of proposed actions.

 

Kevin Martin, president of the Law Society, said: ”The Law Society has a well-documented track record of improvements in complaints handling. We have established an independent Consumer Complaints Board to oversee it and provided the Board with the budget it asked for. It is difficult to see what more we could reasonably do and so this fine flies in the face of logic.”

 

 

 

 

 Law Society Hit By £250k Fine