Office for Legal Complaints

Key Facts

• Our job will be to resolve legal complaints in a fair and independent way – we will not take sides. 

• We will be the Legal Ombudsman for England and Wales. We are being set up by the Office for Legal Complaints (our Board) under the Legal Services Act 2007. Parliament wanted to simplify the system and make sure consumers had access to an independent expert to resolve complaints.

• We will open on 6 October 2010.

• Our service will be open to all members of the public, very small businesses, charities, clubs and trusts. Our service will be free to these consumers.

• We can get involved in different types of complaints about legal services. Some examples are wills, family issues such as divorce, personal injury and buying or selling a house. There are many others.

• We are independent and impartial.  This means that when we start to receive complaints, we will look at the facts in each case and weigh both sides of the story. 

• We are not consumer champions or part of the legal profession, and we are also independent of Government.

• Once we open, if we decide the service you received was unsatisfactory, we can ask the lawyer and the firm to put it right.  We may also say that we think that your lawyer provided a reasonable service – if we think this, we will explain why.

• Most complaints can be resolved informally. If needed, we will carry out a formal investigation. As this could involve us getting more information from you and your lawyer, it could take longer to deal with.

• Once an Ombudsman decision is accepted, we can make sure that the lawyer does do what we say is needed.

• We do not have to investigate every complaint that we receive, even if we have the power to do so. For example, we may decide not to investigate if we think the problem you have told us about has only had a slight impact on you.

• Our help doesn’t cover the legal advice you received from a lawyer or your disappointment you feel because you don’t agree with the outcome of a court case.

• We do not write the rules for lawyers – or police them if the rules are broken.  This is the job of the different legal regulators.

• We are committed to ensuring value for money in how we run the Legal Ombudsman.

We will be able to look into complaints about legal services including:

• Buying and selling a house or property

• Family law such as divorce

• Wills

• Personal injury

• Intellectual property

• Criminal law

• Civil litigation

• Immigration

• Employment issues

There are others that we may also be able to look at – if an area is not on the list then please contact us.