Complaints Handling Procedure / SRA
Complaints Handling Procedure / SRA
Taylor Walton LLP is regulated by The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA), which regulates more than 100,000 solicitors in England and Wales, as well as registered European lawyers and registered foreign lawyers.
Established in January 2007, the SRA is the independent regulatory body of the Law Society of England and Wales. If you would like to view the rules governing the conduct of solicitors they can be found here.
Taylor Walton LLP is a limited liability partnership registered in England & Wales under registration number OC328698.
The Firm maintains professional indemnity insurance in accordance with the rules of the Solicitors Regulation Authority. Details of the insurers and the territorial coverage of the policy are available for inspection at our offices.
Complaints Procedure (January 2024)
Our Complaints Policy
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 Olive McCarthy, our Complaints Partner. You can contact her at our St. Albans office – Thornycroft House, 107 Holywell Hill, St Albans, Hertfordshire, AL1 1HQ.
Telephone – 01727 845245, Email – olive.mccarthy@taylorwalton.co.uk.
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 be dealing with your complaint. You can expect to receive our letter within three working 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 working days of receiving your complaint.
3 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 five working 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 ten working days from receiving their reply and the file.
4 We may invite you to meet with an appropriate Partner to discuss and hopefully resolve your complaint. We will do this within five working days of receiving all the details we need from the member of staff who acted for you.
5 Within seven working days of the meeting we will write to you to confirm what took place and any solutions we have agreed with you.
6 If you do not want 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 seven working days of us completing our investigation.
7 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.
- We will review our own decision within seven working days;
- We will arrange for someone in the firm who has not been involved in your complaint to review it. They will do this within ten working days;
- Olive McCarthy, our Complaints Partner, will review your complaint within ten working days.
8 We will let you know the result of the review within five working days of the end of the review. At this time we will write to you confirming our final position on your complaint and explaining our reasons.
9 If we have to change any of the timescales above, we will let you know and explain why.
10 If you are still not satisfied, you can then contact the Legal Ombudsman at PO Box 6167, Slough, SL1 0EH, Tel: 0300 555 0333, Email: enquiries@legalombudsman.org.uk about your complaint. Any complaint to the Legal Ombudsman about our service must usually be made within six months of our final response to you.
If at any point you become unhappy with the service we provide to you then please advise us immediately so that we can do our best to resolve the problem for you. You can obtain a copy of our Complaints Procedure here from our website.
If we are unable to resolve your complaint then you can have the complaint independently looked at by the Legal Ombudsman. The Legal Ombudsman investigates complaints about services used with lawyers.
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.
11 The Legal Ombudsman may not be prepared to deal with a complaint from a business unless it is regarded as a “micro business” (less than 10 employees and turning over less than 2 million euros per annum or with a balance sheet value of less than 2 million euros).
12 Alternative complaints bodies (such as Ombudsman Service or ProMediate) exist which are competent to deal with complaints about legal services should both you and we wish to use such a scheme.
13 Please note that ‘working days’ refers to Taylor Walton’s working days which are Monday to Friday.
SRA
If you are concerned about the behaviour of this firm/believe we have breached SRA principles, please contact the Solicitors Regulatory Authority “SRA” on https://www.sra.org.uk/consumers/problems/report-solicitor
