Complaints

You can contact us in writing or by speaking with our Complaints Director who can be contacted in the following ways:

  • by calling 0121 809 5550
  • by email to gsc@kewalion.co.uk
  • by post to Complaints Director, Kewalion & Co Solicitors, First Floor, 170a Soho Road, Birmingham, B21 9LP.

Complaints Procedure

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 maintain and improve our standards.

Our Complaints Procedure

If you have a complaint, please contact us with the details.

What Will Happen Next?

1. We will send you a letter acknowledging your complaint and asking you to confirm or explain the details. We will also let you know who will be dealing with your complaint. You can expect to receive our letter within three days of us receiving your complaint.

2. We will record your complaint in our central register. We will do this within a day of receiving your complaint.

3. We will acknowledge your reply and confirm what will happen next. You can expect to hear from us within 2 days of your reply.

4. We will then start to investigate your complaint. This may involve one or more of the following steps.

• We will consider your complaint again. We will then send you our detailed reply or invite you to a meeting to discuss the matter. We will do this within 10 days.

• We may ask another independent solicitor to investigate your complaint and report to us. We will do this within three days.

5. We will then write inviting you to meet our complaints manager and discuss and hopefully resolve your complaint. We will do this within three days.

6. Within two days of the meeting we will write to you to confirm what took place and any solutions we have agreed with you.

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 oursuggestions for resolving the mater. We will do this within five days of completing any investigation.

7. At this stage, if you are still not satisfied, you can let usknow. We will then arrange to review our decision. This may happen in one of the following ways.

    • The Complaints manager will review the decision himself within five days
    • He will arrange for someone who is not connected with the complaint to review his decision. He will do this within 10 days.
    • We will ask our local Law Society or another local firm of solicitors to review your complaint within 10 days. We will let you know how long this process will take.
    • We will invite you to agree to independent mediation within 5 days. We will let you know how long this will take.

8. We will let you know the result of the review within 5 days of the end of the review. At this time I will write to you confirming our final position on your complaint and explaining our reasons. The contact details of the Legal Ombudsman are always provided in the retainer letter that we wrote to you. These are also given further below. If you are still not satisfied, you can contact them about your complaint. If you complaint is not resolved to your satisfaction within 8 weeks, you have a right to complain to the Legal Ombudsman.

If we have to change any of the timescales above, we will let you know and explain why.

If at any point you become unhappy with the service we provide to you, then please inform us immediately so that we can do our best to resolve the problem for you.

You can obtain a copy of our complaints procedure by emailing gsc@kewalion.co.uk

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 service issues 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. Please note that from 1 April 2023 these time limits changed. From the 1 April the Legal Ombudsman expects complaints to be made to them within a year of the date of the act or omission about which you are concerned or within a year of you realising
there was a concern and no longer within 6 years of of the date of the act or omission about which you are concerned or within a year of you realising there was a concern.

Contact details for both bodies are as follows:

The Solicitors Regulation Authority
The Cube, 199 Wharfside Street
Birmingham
B1 1RN
T: 0870 606 2555
www.sra.org.uk

The Legal Ombudsman
PO Box 6806
Wolverhampton, WV1 9WJ
T: 0300 555 0333
www.legalombudsman.org.uk
Email: enquiries@legalombudsman.org.uk


Consumer rights to cancel

If you are a Consumer Client, you may have a right to cancel your contract with us or withdraw your instructions (this is without prejudice to any other right to terminate our relationship under these Terms). If this is applicable to you, full details on how to exercise this right are set out on the Acceptance Form within your 'Welcome' or 'Working with you' pack.

Ending our relationship

We expect to complete the work covered by the Scope and Pricing document but either of us can end our working relationship at any time should either party wish to do so. We will not end our relationship with you under these Terms except for a good reason and where we have given you reasonable notice.