UK's OSS Under Fire From Legal Services Ombudsman

by Robin Pilgrim, LawAndTax-News.com, London

01 December 2003

The UK's Legal Services Ombudsman, Zahida Manzoor last week released an interim report criticising the Law Society's Office for the Supervision of Solicitors (OSS) once again for its complaints handling performance.

Although she acknowledged that there had been some progress made since she was appointed separately to the post of Legal Services Complaints Commissioner, Ms Manzoor revealed that:

"It saddens me to report that, as I had feared, the complaints handling performance of the OSS has continued to deteriorate."

She then went on to explain that the OSS had failed to meet all but one of its targets for complaints handling in 2003, having closed 45% of cases within three months (when the target was 65%), and failed to meet the ombudsman's satisfaction rating target of 75%; she revealed that she was only satisfied with the OSS's handling of complaints in 57% of cases.

However, the Legal Services Ombudsman did praise the "significant improvement in performance" at the OSS customer assistance unit, where call answering performance has been upgraded.

Responding to the report, Law Society chief executive, Janet Paraskeva announced that:

"We accept there is still much work for us to do to deliver a consumer complaints service which meets the standards we are aiming for. But we are disappointed that the report fails to recognise properly the significant progress which has been made over the last few months."

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