Complaints
We aim to offer a high quality legal service to all our clients and we are confident that we shall do so. With this in mind, we are always anxious to hear of any particular difficulty that a client may encounter either with the conduct of their matter or with our back-up services.
If you are unhappy about any aspect of our service or about the bill please contact the adviser handling your matter or, if you would prefer not to do so, we would ask you to contact Tim Wilson (Solicitor and Director). We have a complaints handling procedure in place and we will send you a written copy of our procedure on request.
If you are not satisfied with our handling of your complaint, you can ask the Legal Ombudsman to consider the complaint, or alternative complaints bodies exist which are competent to deal with complaints about legal services should both you and we wish to use such a scheme. We will provide details of such an alternative complaints body if necessary, as we are obliged to do under the Alternative Dispute Resolution for Consumer Dispute Regulations 2015, but we do not agree to use such schemes, preferring instead to rely on the service provided by the Legal Ombudsman.
The Legal Ombudsman can be contacted by post at PO Box 6806, Wolverhampton WV1 9WJ, by phone on 0300 555 0333 – minicom: 0300 555 1777 or by email to enquiries@legalombudsman.org.uk (the website is at www.legalombudsman.org.uk). You should complain to the Legal Ombudsman within six months of the end of our complaints process. In addition, you should be aware that the Legal Ombudsman will not accept a complaint if:
- more than six years have elapsed from the date of alleged act/omission giving rise to the complaint, or
- more than three years have elapsed from when you should have known about the complaint, or
- the date of alleged act/omission giving rise to the complaint was before 6 October 2010
We are defined as an ‘online trader’ and, as such, under the EU Regulation on Consumer Online Dispute Regulation (ODR), we are also obliged to publish our email address and a link to the EU ODR platform on our website. For clarity, we also publish the required information below:
Our email address is reception@hughes-parry.co.uk. The EU ODR platform can be found at: http://ec.europa.eu/odr
Finally if your complaint concerns your bill, there may also be a right to apply to the court for an assessment of the bill under Part III of the Solicitors Act 1974. You should be aware that there are strict time limits applicable to this procedure and you may wish therefore to seek independent legal advice. We may also be entitled to charge interest on any outstanding sums from any invoices that are unpaid in full or part.