What will happen next:

1. A letter acknowledging receipt of your complaint will be sent to you, asking you to clarify or corroborate the information provided. We will also provide you with the name of the individual who will be handling your complaint.
2. Your complaint will be noted in our central registry.
3. After that, we'll get to work looking into your issue. One or more of the following actions may be necessary for this:

• We might request that the member of staff who represented you respond to your appointment within a span of 21 days.
• After reviewing their response and the information in your letter of complaint, we might ask them for additional information. It may take up to 14 days for them to respond to this.

Please note that if it is a case where we need information from a third part, i.e. a Barrister, we may need to wait until a response is received from that third party and this may delay the resolution of your complaint.

    4.  We will invite you to meet the caseworker in charge of the matter involved in your complaint to discuss and hopefully resolve your complaint. We will do this within 28 days of receiving all the details we need from the member of staff who acted for you.

   5.  Within 7 days of meeting, we will write to you to confirm what took place and any solutions that we have agreed with you.

If you do not require a meeting or it is not possible, we will send you a detailed reply to your complaint. This will include our suggestion for resolving the matter. This will happen within 7 days of us completing our investigation.

   6.  At this stage if you are still not satisfied you can contact us again. We will then arrange to review our decision. This will happen in one of the following ways.

• The Caseworker in charge of the matter involved in your complaint will review his or her decision within five days; or
• We will arrange for a director in the firm who has not been involved in your complaint to review it. They will do so within 10 days: or
• Siobu Brady, our director will review your complaint within 10 working days.

    7.  We will let you know the result of the review within 5 days at the end of the review. At this time we will write to you confirming our final position on your complaint and explaining our reasons. We will also give you the name and address of the Legal Ombudsman.

   8.  Before accepting any complaint for investigation, the Legal Ombudsman will check that you have tried to resolve your complaint with us first. If you have not, then you must take your complaint to the Legal Ombudsman:

• Within six months of receiving a final response to your complaint, and,
• Not later than one year from the date of the act or omission being complained about; or; 
• Not later than one year from the date when you should have realised that there was a cause for complaint.

In some instances, the Legal Ombudsman may have the discretion to accept complaints that are submitted beyond the deadline. Please visit the Legal Ombudsman's website at www.legalombudsman.org.uk for more information.

We will notify you and provide an explanation if we need to alter any of the previously stated timelines.