Complaints

We take any complaints or client dissatisfaction very seriously.

If there is ever anything which you are not happy with and would like to discuss informally with someone other than the person handling your matter, then please contact Sonal Gadhia on 0116 289 7000 or by email at sonal.gadhia@bhwsolicitors.com.

If, after an informal discussion or otherwise, you wish for your complaint to be formally investigated under our complaints procedure, you should email (or write to) Paul Davis (paul.davis@bhwsolicitors.com) setting out your complaint in detail, including any documentation or information that you consider is relevant to the complaint.

If you make a formal complaint, we have eight weeks to consider it.

What will happen next?

1. Within three days we will send you a letter acknowledging your complaint and asking you to confirm or explain any details. If it seems appropriate, we will suggest a meeting at this stage.

2. We may then record your complaint in our central register and will also investigate your complaint by examining the relevant file, which should take no longer than 28 days.

3. If appropriate we may then invite you to meet Paul to discuss and hopefully resolve your complaint. If we do not consider it appropriate or if you do not want to meet Paul, we will write fully to you setting out our views on the situation and any redress that we would feel to be appropriate.

4. At this stage, if you are still not satisfied, please let us know and we will arrange for a review of our decision. We would generally aim to do this within 14 days. This will happen in one of the following ways:

– Paul will review his decision;

– We will arrange for a partner of the firm who has not been involved in your complaint to review the decision.

– We will ask our local law society or another local firm of solicitors to review your complaint (we will let you know how long this process will take); or

– We will invite you to agree to independent mediation (we will let you know how long this process will take).

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.

The Legal Ombudsman

If we have not informed you of our final decision within eight weeks, you have the right to complain to the Legal Ombudsman.

If you are not satisfied with our final decision in respect of your complaint, you can ask the Legal Ombudsman to consider the complaint. 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 or within six years of the act or omission about which you are complaining occurred (or if outside of this period, within three years of when you should reasonably have been aware of it).

The Legal Ombudsman can be contacted as follows:
Legal Ombudsman, PO Box 6167, Slough, SL1 0EH
enquiries@legalombudsman.org.uk
https://www.legalombudsman.org.uk/

Other than where required by an order of any court of competent jurisdiction or any regulatory, judicial, governmental or similar body, the details of your resolved complaint will remain confidential.

Complaints referred by the Legal Ombudsman

You must first raise a complaint with us before lodging it with the Legal Ombudsman and follow the complaints procedure set out above. If you approach the Legal Ombudsman before our procedures are complete, the Legal Ombudsman will refer the complaint back to our Client Care Partner, Paul Davis. Our normal complaints procedures will then be followed.

Alternative dispute resolution

Alternative dispute resolution (ADR) organisations, such as Pro Mediate UK Limited (www.promediate.co.uk) or CEDR in London (www.cedr.com) exist and are competent to deal with complaints about legal services should both you and our firm wish to use such a scheme. However, we have chosen not to adopt an ADR process because the Legal Ombudsman already offer a service to resolve complaints. For this reason we do not consider that there is any benefit in seeking to use an alternative organisation.

Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA)

BHW is authorised and regulated by the SRA. The SRA can assist you, if a solicitor, a regulated firm or a member of its staff has breached the SRA Principles. You can report concerns about professional conduct to the SRA. Information about how to do this is on its website at sra.org.uk/consumers/problems/report-solicitor/. To contact the SRA call: 0370 606 2555, email report@sra.org.uk, or write to the Solicitors Regulation Authority, The Cube, 199 Wharfside Street, Birmingham B1 1RN.

How to complain if you are not our client

If you are not our client (e.g. you are involved in a transaction with a client of our firm) we will only be able to deal with your complaint if you wish to make a complaint about how personal data has been handled or if you are alleging that we have breached the SRA Professional Conduct Principles. In any other situation, we will respond to let you know that we cannot deal with your complaint and that we will not be able to correspond further with you. If you are involved in a matter we are dealing with and have your own legal representation, our professional rules require us to liaise with your representative, therefore we would suggest that you refer to your representative in this instance.