A client's letter of complaint reaches the firm on 3 March, and a partner sends a two line acknowledgement before the week is out. Eight weeks from receipt falls on 28 April. The dates and sequence are illustrative, and none of it needs anyone to behave badly.
The letter goes back to the fee earner whose work it criticises, with a note asking for comments. They read it as an attack on their advice and start a rebuttal between hearings, then set it aside when a trial bundle falls due. Nobody has diarised the eight week point, and 28 April passes unnoticed. In early June a four page reply goes out defending each step on the file. It never mentions the Legal Ombudsman.
That letter fails twice. The SRA Code of Conduct for Solicitors requires a firm, where a complaint has not been resolved to the client's satisfaction within eight weeks of its making, to tell the client in writing of any right to complain to the Legal Ombudsman, the time frame for doing so and full details of how to contact the Ombudsman. The Ombudsman tells firms the same: after eight weeks the client can bring the complaint to it.
The second failure costs more. The Ombudsman's guidance to firms says its six month limit, running from the firm's final response, applies only where that response said the Ombudsman was available, gave its address, telephone and email, and warned that the complaint must be referred within six months of the date of the response. Its own words for a response that omits the warning are that the six month clock never starts. The Ombudsman's one year limits still run, from the act complained of or from the client realising there was cause for complaint, and the Ombudsman can stretch even those. The firm in this example has given up the one limit it controlled.
What a firm can put in place this week
Start with a complaints log, kept centrally rather than on the matter file, recording the client, the matter, the date the complaint arrived and the date of each response. A spreadsheet will do, so long as one partner sees every open complaint and its age.
Name a handler for each complaint on the day it is logged, and where the firm's size allows, make it someone other than the person complained about. The fee earner still explains what happened and why, but the handler decides what the client is told. In a sole practice it means writing the response as though a colleague were reading it.
Diary the eight week point at the moment of receipt, against the handler rather than the fee earner, with a reminder two weeks earlier so that a substantive reply is written and checked in time. The Code requires complaints to be dealt with promptly, fairly and free of charge, so the time spent answering one goes nowhere near the client's bill.
Then write a standard closing paragraph once, approve it, and paste it into every final response and every eight week letter. It names the Legal Ombudsman, gives its current address, telephone number and email, and warns the client to refer the complaint within six months of the date of the letter. The Ombudsman's own sample wording adds that it expects the complaint to reach it within one year of the act or omission complained of, or within one year of the client realising there was cause for complaint. Check it against the Ombudsman's website whenever you review the client care letter, which must tell clients at the outset how and when to complain to the firm and to the Ombudsman.
What the overnight read sees
The Bracton AI Assistant reads every live matter overnight inside the case management system the firm already runs. It reads the post as it arrives against its file, and where a letter reads as a complaint it raises the matter to a supervisor with the wording that triggered it. It drafts a holding reply from the firm's own precedents for a qualified fee earner to read, change and approve, and where the approved Ombudsman paragraph sits in those precedents the draft carries it. Whether a letter is a complaint at all stays a person's decision, and the eight week date stays in the handler's diary.
Working through another vendor's interface, the assistant sees what that interface exposes, which we tell you at proposal. Inside Bracton, the case and client management platform, it reads and writes the same record, so the complaint, its dates and the reply sit together on the file. Every draft waits for a fee earner to read and approve, and nothing leaves the firm in the assistant's name.
The fair test is your own records. The exercise we run first reads an export of your client ledgers against the Accounts Rules and hands you the exceptions in writing, so you judge our reading of your records on money you already understand before anything of ours goes near a complaint file. To start, book a client account review.