GAMLINS COMPLAINTS PROCEDURE

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

OUR COMPLAINTS PROCEDURE

If you have a complaint, please contact Mr.S.Williams, our Client Care Partner. You can write to him at: 31-37 Russell Road, Rhyl, Denbighshire LL18 3DB or you can telephone him on 01745 343500.

Mr. Williams will pass your complaint to the partner in charge of the department involved in your complaint.

WHAT WILL HAPPEN NEXT?

  1. We will send you a letter acknowledging your complaint and asking you to confirm or explain the details set out. We will also let you know the name of the person who will dealing with your complaint. You can expect to receive our letter within 4 days of us receiving your complaint.
  2. We will record your complaint in our central register and open a file for your complaint. We will do this within three days of receiving your complaint.
  3. We will acknowledge your reply to our acknowledgment letter and confirm what will happen next. You can expect to hear from us within fourteen days of your reply.
  4. We will then start to investigate your complaint. This may involve one or more of the following steps:
  • We may ask the member of staff who acted for you to reply to your complaint within 14 days.
  • We may examine their reply and the information in your complaint file. We may then ask them for more information. This will take up to 10 days from receiving their reply and the file.
  1. We may invite you to meet the Head of Department to discuss and hopefully resolve your complaint. We will do this within 14 days of receiving all the details we need from the member of staff acted for you.
  2. Within 7 days of any meeting we will write to you to confirm what took place and any solutions we have agreed with you including whether any unsatisfactory procedures need correcting
  3. At this stage, if you are still not satisfied you can write to us again. We will then arrange to review our decision within 14 days.
  4. We will let you know the result of the review within 14 days of the end of the review. At this time we will write to you confirming our final position on your complaint and expressing our reasons. We will give you the name and address of The Legal Ombudsman. If you are still not satisfied, you can contact them about your complaint.

If we have to change any of the timescales above, we will let you know and explain why.

Legal Ombudsman

We are permitted a minimum of eight weeks to consider the complaint.  If for any reason we are unable to resolve the problem between us within that timeframe, then our clients are advised that they may ask the Legal Ombudsman to consider the complaint.

Clients are free to refer any complaint about our work, fees or level of service but there are some conditions and time limits.  Please be aware that any complaint to the Legal Ombudsman must usually be made within six months of the client having received a final written response from us about their complaint.   Complaints to the Legal Ombudsman must usually be made within six years of the act or omission about which the client is complaining occurring; or within three years from when the client should have known about or become aware that there were grounds for complaint.  The Legal Ombudsman will not accept complaints where the act or date of awareness was before 6 October 2010.

For further information, please contact the Legal Ombudsman on 0300 555 0333 or visit www.legalombudsman.org.uk. The Legal Ombudsman may be contacted at PO Box 6806, Wolverhampton WV1 9WJ.

Please do be aware that if you are a business (other than a micro-enterprise), charity or club with an annual income of more than £1 million or a trustee of a trust with an asset value of more than £1 million you cannot use the Legal Ombudsman to consider your complaint.

Solicitors Regulation Authority

If someone thinks a solicitor might be dishonest or you have concerns about their ethics or integrity, they have the right to notify our regulator, the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA).  There are no time limits for making a report but there are limits on what the SRA will consider. Please note that the SRA is not able to deal with issues of poor service (complaints of this nature should instead be referred to the Legal Ombudsman).

For further information about the SRA’s role and the means to make a complaint, please contact the SRA on 0370 606 2555 or visit: https://www.sra.org.uk/consumers/problems/report-solicitor.page#report

 

Version (latest): February 2021