Our Complaints Policy
Before accepting a complaint for investigation, the Legal Ombudsman will check that you have tried to resolve your complaint with us first. If you have, then you must take your complaint to the Legal Ombudsman.
The Legal Ombudsman expects complaints to be made to them within one year of the date of the act or omission about which you are concerned, or within one year of you realising there was a concern. You must also refer your concerns to the Legal Ombudsman within six months of our final response to you.
What will happen next?
1. Your complaint will be passed immediately to our Client Care Manager, or deputy Client Care Manager, and within seven days we will send you a letter acknowledging your complaint and you will be informed about how long it will take to reply in detail to the matters you have raised. You may be asked to confirm or explain your complaint in more detail.
2. We will record your complaint in our central register and open a separate file for your complaint.
3. Your complaint will then be thoroughly investigated. Your file will be considered, and the member of staff who acted for you may be spoken to by the Client Care Manager or such other person nominated by him to investigate matters.
4. You will then be sent a detailed reply to your complaint including our suggestions for resolving the matter.
5. At this stage, if you are still not satisfied, you can contact us again and ask us to review our decision. This will happen by another manager of the Company reviewing the decision within 15 days.
6. We will let you know the result of the review within 10 days of the review being completed. At this time, we will write to you confirming our final position on your complaint and explaining our reasons.
7. If you are still not satisfied with our handling of your complaint you can ask the Legal Ombudsman to consider the complaint. Contact details are as follows:
PO Box 6167, Slough, SL1 0EH
Tel: 0300 555 0333
Email: enquiries@legalombudsman.org.uk Web: www.legalombudsman.org.uk
8. Before accepting a complaint for investigation, the Legal Ombudsman will check that you have tried to resolve your complaint with us first. If you have, then you must take your complaint to the Legal Ombudsman:
The Legal Ombudsman expects complaints to be made to them within one year of the date of the act or omission about which you are concerned, or within one year of you realising there was a concern. You must also refer your concerns to the Legal Ombudsman within six months of our final response to you.
9. If we have to change any of the above timescales, we will let you know and explain why.
Complaints about your bill:
The above complaints procedure also applies to complaints arising concerning our bill. There may also be a right to object to the bill by applying to the court for an assessment of the bill under Part III of the Solicitors Act 1974; and that if all, or part, of a bill remains unpaid, the firm may be entitled to charge interest.
Raising concerns with our regulator:
The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) can help you if you are concerned about our behaviour. This could be for things like dishonesty, taking or losing your money or treating you unfairly because of your age, a disability or other characteristic. You can find information about raising your concerns with the SRA at SRA | Reporting an individual or firm | Solicitors Regulation Authority in the ‘For the public’ section.
Please get in touch for any further information: www.sra.org.uk/consumers/problems/report-solicitor
Data protection/UK GDPR
We use the information you provide primarily for the provision of legal services to you and for related purposes including updating and enhancing client records, analysis to help us manage our practice, statutory returns and legal/regulatory compliance. Our use of that information is subject to your instructions, data protection law and our duty of confidentiality.
Please note that our work for you may require us to pass on such information to third parties such as expert witnesses and other professional advisers, including sometimes advisers appointed by another party to your matter. We may also give such information to others who perform services for us, such as typing or photocopying. Our practice may be audited or checked by our accountants or our regulator, or by other organisations. We do not normally copy such information to anyone outside the European Economic Area, however we may do so however when the particular circumstances of your matter so require. All such third parties are required to maintain confidentiality in relation to your files.
You have a right of access under data protection law to the personal data that we hold about you. We seek to keep that personal data correct and up to date. You should let us know if you believe the information we hold about you needs to be corrected or updated. The person in the firm with overall responsibility for data protection compliance is the Data Protection Lead, Clare McCourt, cmc@bradfordfamilylaw.co.uk. The firm is registered with the Information Commissioner. Further information regarding data protection and privacy is available from the Information Commissioner’s Office www.ico.org.uk.
Under the UK GDPR regulations you, as a data subject, have a number of rights. These include the right to be informed, the right of access, the right to rectification, the right to erasure, the right to restrict processing, the right to data portability, the right to object and rights in relation to automated decision making and profiling. Further information about these rights is set out on the ICO website referred to above and on our website www.bradfordfamilylaw.co.uk
We may receive personal data from you for the purposes of our money laundering checks, such as a copy of your passport. These will be processed only for the purposes of preventing money laundering and terrorist financing, or as otherwise permitted by law or with your express consent. You consent to us retaining such data for longer than the five-year statutory period, unless you tell us otherwise.
If you send us personal data about anyone other than yourself, you must ensure you have any appropriate consents and notices in place to enable you to transfer that personal data to us and so that we may use it for the purposes for which you provide it to us.