We wish to provide you with high quality legal advice and client care in all respects.
We are committed to providing a high-quality service to our clients and we pride ourselves on our thorough and professional approach to our work.
Whilst we rarely receive complaints, we believe that it is important to have procedures in place to help you in the unlikely event of your wishing to make a complaint.
The following procedure is intended to inform you of the way in which we handle complaints and help you to decide the best approach to take. When something goes wrong, we need you to tell us about it.
The person with overall responsibility for managing complaints is Rebecca Atkinson, the firm's General Counsel and Compliance Officer for Legal Practice. Rebecca is assisted by the Risk & Compliance team.
We ask that you communicate your complaint to us in writing setting out your particular concerns. This helps us to understand your complaint and respond to it.
If you want to raise a complaint under this procedure please email Rebecca Atkinson at Rebecca.Atkinson@howardkennedy.com.
Alternatively, you can write to the lawyer with conduct of your matter or the supervising Partner and request your complaint be forwarded to Rebecca Atkinson.
If your complaint is not resolved to your satisfaction within 8 weeks or you remain dissatisfied after receiving our final complaint response, you have the right to complain to the Legal Ombudsman. 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.
We hope that this will not be necessary, but the Legal Ombudsman's contact details are as follows:
Legal Ombudsman, PO Box 6167, Slough, SL1 0EH
Telephone: 0300 555 0333
Email: enquiries@legalombudsman.org.uk
We will remind you of this right to complain to the Legal Ombudsman at the conclusion of our complaints process.
Where we are unable to resolve your complaint, you also have the option of contacting an alternative complaints body competent to deal with complaints about legal services should both you and our firm wish to use such a scheme.
We will inform you at the end of the complaints procedure whether we agree to the use of an alternative complaints body.
We are, of course, always glad to receive your comments on our service and to hear how we can help to improve it. Any complaint is always taken very seriously and if you do find cause for complaint you can be assured that it will be investigated thoroughly.
If you have concerns about our conduct such as dishonesty, taking or losing your money or treating you unfairly because of your age, a disability or other characteristic you have the right to raise your concerns with our regulator, the Solicitors Regulation Authority. You can visit their website to see how to raise your concerns: visit SRA website here.
