Complaints

We are committed to providing a high quality service to all our clients. When something goes wrong please do tell us about it. This will help us to improve our standards.

How will we deal with your complaint?

Stage 1

In most cases, the best person to respond quickly to your complaint is the person you have been dealing with or their manager, who will be one of the senior Partners, Muhammad Rafiq or Jahangir Kanth. We will acknowledge your complaint within five working days of receiving it and the department you've been dealing with will respond to you within 10 working days of acknowledging your complaint. We may be able to deal with the matter in a phone call, or we may need to carry out a detailed review of your case. In all cases we will write to you to tell you the outcome of your complaint and to give you the opportunity to have your complaint reviewed by a senior partner if you are not satisfied with the outcome.

Stage 2

The partner will acknowledge your complaint within five working days of receiving it. It may take them up to 20 working days to respond to your complaint from the date they acknowledge it. In some cases, the department you have been dealing with may pass your complaint directly to one of the partner. (If they do this, we will tell you why.)

What if my complaint is justified?

If your complaint is justified, we will apologise to you and explain what went wrong and how we plan to put things right. We will learn from our mistakes to improve how we work. In serious cases, we may consider offering a special payment for failures in our service.

What if I am not satisfied with the response from one of the senior partner?

If you are still unhappy with our response, you can ask the independent reviewer to review your complaint. The independent reviewer is independent of us, and you can either tell us that you would like to refer your complaint and we can do this for you, or you can do it yourself. You must do this within 20 working days from our senior partner sending you its response. The independent reviewer will only be able to investigate your complaint after we have completed all the stages of our complaints procedure. They have specific conditions for accepting a complaint, and will decide whether to carry out a full review by considering, among other things, whether: • we have already dealt with your complaint fully and responded appropriately • it would be unreasonable to carry out a full review, for example if the complaint is a minor one • there is an opportunity for you and us to sort out the complaint

What do to if we cannot resolve your complaint?

The Solicitors Regulation Authority can help you if you are concerned about our behaviour. Most of the time, complaints about poor service should be sent to the Legal Ombudsman. If the Legal Ombudsman thinks your case involves a breach of the SRA Principles, the Legal Ombudsman will refer your case to the SRA. The SRA may investigate matters such as complaints of dishonesty, taking or losing your money or treating you unfairly because of your age, a disability or other characteristic or if you think our firm has breached an SRA Principle.

http://www.sra.org.uk/consumers/problems/report-solicitor.page

Phone

0370 606 2555 inside the UK (Call costs guide from Ofcom)

International callers

+44 (0)121 329 6800

Postal address

Solicitors Regulation Authority, The Cube, 199 Wharfside Street, Birmingham, B1 1RN (map of location) or DX 720293 BIRMINGHAM 47
The Legal Ombudsman can help you if we are unable to resolve your complaint ourselves. They will look at your complaint for free and independently and it will not affect how we handle your case. 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: • Within six months of receiving a final response to your complaint • and • No more than six years from the date of act/omission; or • No more than three years from when you should reasonably have known there was cause for complaint. If you would like more information about the Legal Ombudsman, please contact them. Contact details

http://www.legalombudsman.org.uk

Call: 0300 555 0333 between 9am to 5pm.

enquiries@legalombudsman.org.uk

Legal Ombudsman PO Box 6806, Wolverhampton, WV1 9WJ

Alternative Dispute Resolution (‘ADR’)

Alternative complaints bodies such as ProMediate exist which are competent to deal with complaints about legal services should you (and our firm) wish to use such a scheme. Please note that there are different timescales for dealing with complaints when using ADR and you should contact the company below to discuss these.

Contact details

Brow Farm Top Road, Frodsham, WA6 6SP, United Kingdom

Email address: enquiries@promediate.co.uk

Website: http://www.promediate.co.uk

Phone: 02036213908