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SRA Regulatory

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We are regulated and authorised by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA). To comply with SRA rules we he have to tell our clients that they may make a complaint, and also publish our Complaints Policy.

Our Complaints Policy

We are committed to providing a high-quality service to all our clients, and we hope that as our client you will not have cause for complaint. We always set out to do our best, but we are human, and this means that sometimes things may go wrong. If this happens, we will be sorry and we will want to try and put things right as quickly as we can.

This policy explains how we will deal with any complaint that is referred to us. Please also refer to our Client Agreement and our terms of business (sent to you at the outset of your matter). The person you have been dealing with at the firm will, if possible, try and resolve any issue that you raise so that you do not need to make a formal complaint.

Your complaint might concern the way in which you have been dealt with, the quality of advice you have received, or any invoice that you have received. We will treat matters as being a ‘complaint’ if you have raised one of these issues and your advisor has been unable to satisfactorily resolve the matter within 14 days.

Our Complaints Procedure

If you have a complaint, please contact either Niels McKenzie or Victoria McKenzie who are both solicitors and directors of McKenzie Law. You can contact them by post at Global House, Sitka Drive, Shrewsbury Business Park SY2 6LG, or by e-mail niels@mckenzielaw.co.uk or vicki@mckenzielaw.co.uk.

  • We ask that any formal concerns are raised in writing and we will ask you to complete our Complaints Form which we will send to you as soon as possible, and always within 10 working days, however if you are unable to complete this form because of your state of health or circumstances, please telephone us on 01743 244666.

To explain to you how long this process might take we have included our target times for each stage of the process. Where, for any reason, it is not possible to observe any of these limits we will let you know and explain why.

What will happen next?

  1. Within 3 business days of our receipt of your completed Complaints Form we will send you a written acknowledgement of your complaint. We will open a file for your complaint in our system and Mr or Mrs McKenzie will review the file that we have relating to your work. We will complete our initial examination within 7 business days of our receipt of your completed Complaints Form.
  2. We might then write to you to ask for further information or we may seek to arrange a telephone or video meeting with you. Alternatively we might write to you setting out our views on the situation and suggesting any redress that we would feel to be appropriate. We will aim to write to you with our views and any suggestions within 7 days of completing our investigations.
  3. Should we feel that in relation to your matter we have regrettably failed in our standards, by way of resolution we could offer you an apology, a reduction of any invoice or a repayment in relation to any payment received.
  4. If, by this stage, you are still not satisfied, please let us know in writing. It would be helpful to us if you could do so within the next 21 days but there is no obligation on you to do so.  We will then arrange to review our decision.  We would generally aim to do this within 10 days of hearing from you as to whether you are satisfied or not with our decision.  We will usually do this by asking another director in this firm to review the file that we have on your complaint to see if they agree with our response. If we do not think this is appropriate, we may ask another independent solicitor to review the matter for us (but only with your agreement).
  5. We will let you know the result of the review of our decision within 7 business days of the end of the review and will do so by writing to you to confirm our final position on your complaint and explaining our reasons.
  6. If at the end of this procedure you are not satisfied with our final position on your complaint you may approach the Legal Ombudsman (‘the LeO’) who provides a service examining complaints against lawyers, including Solicitors’ firms. They will usually expect us to have concluded our examination of your complaint within 8 weeks and will usually expect to have complaints referred to them within 6 months of the end of our complaints handling process as set out above. Please be aware that the time limit for referring a complaint to the LeO is not later than one year from the date: a) of the act or omission being complained about; or b) when you should have realised that there was cause for complaint. The LeO has discretion to accept out-of-time complaints in circumstances where it deems it ‘fair and reasonable to do so’. The services provided by the LeO are limited to individuals and smaller organisations – for more details see their website. The full details of how to contact this office are as follows:

Telephone: 0300 555 0333

Minicom: 18002 0300 555 0333

E-mail: enquiries@legalombudsman.org.uk

Website: www.legalombudsman.org.uk

Address: Legal Ombudsman, PO Box 6806, Wolverhampton WV1 9WJ

We will always do our best to address any dissatisfaction that you have experienced concerning our services. Our primary objective is to put things right as quickly as we can.