Complaints Handling Procedure
Our complaints handling policy
Sanders Witherspoon LLP is 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. If you have a complaint, please contact Tim Gir, our client care partner. You can contact him by:
Writing to Unit 7 Radford Crescent, Billericay, Essex CM12 0DU
Email: tim@sanderswitherspoon.co.uk or Telephone: 01277 284508
Mr. Gir will pass your complaint to the person in charge of the department involved in your complaint.
What will happen next?
1. We will send you a letter acknowledging receipt of your complaint and asking you to confirm or explain/set out the details. We will also let you know the name of the person who will be dealing with your complaint. You can expect to receive our letter within seven working days of us receiving your complaint. This may ask for clarification of your complaint so we understand it fully.
2. We will record your complaint in our central register and open a file for your complaint.
3. We will acknowledge your reply to our acknowledgement letter and confirm what will happen next. You can expect to hear from us within ten working days of your reply.
4. We will then start to investigate your complaint. This may involve one or more of the following steps:
- We may ask the member of staff who acted for you to reply to your complaint within fourteen working days
- We may examine the reply and the information in your complaint file. We may then ask them for more information. This may take up to four weeks from receiving the reply and the file.
5. If appropriate we will invite you to meet the person dealing with your complaint to discuss and, it is hoped, resolve your complaint.
6. Within seven working days of any meeting we will write to you to confirm what took place and any suggestions we have agreed with you. If you do not want a meeting, or it is not possible, we will send you a detailed rely to your complaint. This will include our suggestions for resolving the matter.
7. At this stage, if you are still not satisfied you can write to us again. We will then arrange to review our decision. This will happen in one of the following ways:
The person dealing with your complaint will review their own decision within seven working days;
We will arrange for someone in the firm who has not been involved in your complaint to review it. He or she will do this within ten working days;
Another Partner will review your complaint within ten working days;
We may ask our local Law Society or another local firm of solicitors to review your complaint within ten working days. We will then report to you how long the whole process will take; or
We may invite you to agree to independent mediation. We will let you know how long this process will take.
8. We will let you now the result of the review within seven working 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.
We will remind you at that stage that, if we have been unable to settle your complaint using our internal complaints process that you have a right to complain to the Legal Ombudsman, an independent complaints body, established under the Legal Services Act 2007, to deal with legal services complaints.
You will have 6 months from the date of our final letter in which to complain to the Legal Ombudsman. The Legal Ombudsman can be contacted as follows:-
Legal Ombudsman, PO Box 6806, Wolverhampton, WV1 9WJ;
Telephone Number 0300 555 0333
Email enquiries@legalombudsman.org.uk
Website – www.legalombudsman.org.uk
We will also provide you with the details of any alternative complaints bodies which exist that are competent to deal with complaints about legal services should both you and our firm wish to use such a scheme. We will, at that time, inform you whether we will agree to use such a scheme.