Complaints Policy
We aim to provide a high quality legal service to all clients and we recognise that complaints may provide us with an opportunity to check the quality of our service and to make improvements. We also recognise that:
(a) We have obligations under Sections 8.2 – 8.5 (Complaints Handling) of the SRA Code of Conduct to provide information about our complaints procedure to our clients at the outset of their matter; and that
(b) All of our individual clients and some of our organisational clients have the right to complain to the Legal Ombudsman, provided that they do so within the Ombudsman’s time limits; and that
(c) All complaints that we deal with should be dealt with promptly, fairly, openly and effectively.
Informal Resolution
Minor concerns can often be resolved by informal discussion with the solicitor responsible for a particular matter and we encourage clients with concerns to raise these with their solicitor or complaints manager in the first instance.
Our Complaints Manager is Ashleigh Harold, who can be contacted at our London office.
Before setting out your complaint, you may wish to review the guidance notes published by the Legal Ombudsman relating to complaints against solicitors. These are published on the Legal Ombudsman’s website, the details of which are provided below.
Please make any complaint as soon as possible following the acts or omissions about which you wish to complain and in any event within no more than ten months of such acts or omissions. We may decline to investigate complaints raised outside of these time limits, and you may also lose or have lost any right to complain to the Legal Ombudsman, whose own time limits are referred to below.
Our Investigation
We will normally acknowledge each complaint sent to our complaints manager within two working days of receipt.
The complaints manager carrying out the investigation will establish a separate file for the investigation in order that a written record of it is kept and in order that the investigation file can be readily provided to the Legal Ombudsman if subsequently requested.
The Complaints Manager investigating the complaint will review your complaint, consider relevant papers from the file and other records, and make any wider enquiries within the firm as may be necessary. He or she may also ask to meet with you in the course of our investigation, if clarification is needed regarding any points raised in your complaint.
We will usually respond substantively to a complaint within 28 days. If that is not possible, we will let you know when you will receive our full response. We always aim to respond to a complaint within 56 days of it first being made to us. This is also the period within which the Legal Ombudsman expects firms to respond.
In our substantive response to you, we shall:
(a) Outline the investigations that we have carried out;
(b) Provide our conclusions in relation to your complaint; and
(c) Explain how we have reached those conclusions based on our investigation.
If we find that we have fallen short of what you should have expected from us, then we may also:
(a) Explain what went wrong;
(b) Propose one or more remedies to you; and/or
(c) Explain how we have changed our practices to prevent similar problems in the future.
No charge will be made to you for the work done in responding to your complaint.
The Legal Ombudsman
If you are not satisfied with the response that we have provided to your complaint, then you may have the right to complain to the Legal Ombudsman. This right is available to all individual clients and to some organisational clients.
The Legal Ombudsman deals with complaints against Solicitors and may be contacted at:
The Legal Ombudsman
PO Box 6167 Slough
SL1 0EH
Tel: 0300 555 0333
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. Before making a complaint to the Legal Ombudsman, it is a requirement that you have raised your complaint with us first and given us 8 weeks to investigate and provide you with our final response. You must also refer your concerns to the Legal Ombudsman within six months of our final response to you.
Data Protection Complaints
The sections above deal with complaints about the standard of service you have received from us. A complaint about how we have handled your personal data is dealt with separately, as it falls under UK data protection law rather than the Legal Ombudsman’s remit.
Under section 164A of the Data Protection Act 2018 (inserted by the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025), you have the right to complain directly to us if you consider that we have infringed the UK GDPR or the Data Protection Act 2018 in relation to your personal data. We welcome the opportunity to look into any concern directly and you can raise a complaint by contacting:
We will acknowledge your complaint within 30 days of receipt. We will then, without undue delay, make appropriate enquiries into the matter, keep you informed of our progress, and inform you of the outcome.
If you remain unsatisfied with our response, or you would prefer to raise the matter independently, you have the right to complain directly to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK’s independent regulator for data protection who can be contacted at:
Further detail on how we handle personal data, including your rights under UK GDPR, is set out in our Privacy Policy.