Fit for purpose?

The eye-watering estimate of £21,459,750 for dealing with a recent Freedom of Information request could be the starting pistol for a long overdue debate on whether the Legal Ombudsman (LeO) is 'fit for purpose'.

The request, which LeO refused to comply with, asked for the number of complaints accepted for investigation by LeO where the alleged act or omission occurred after the end of the retainer.

LeO estimates that it will take 858,319 hours to answer the request. It would therefore take a single member of staff about 510 years to compile the response.

Most of us take for granted the ease with which we can obtain information from our computer systems with just a few key strokes. Not so it seems for the staff of LeO, whose computer system seems to be anything but 'fit for purpose'.

The request is about the jurisdiction of LeO. Most of us probably think that the acts or omissions that can be investigated by LeO must occur during the retainer. Not so, says LeO. They say that the complaints jurisdiction is not limited to the period of the retainer nor the services that the lawyer agreed to provide. LeO says that the complaints handling jurisdiction includes actions taken when seeking to recover unpaid costs and can even include aspects of the conduct of legal proceedings taken as part of the costs recovery exercise.

In fact, the way LeO sets out the assertion on post-retainer jurisdiction says much about the quality of its output: "This office by all means can consider the service provided. When a firm chooses to sue a former client for unpaid costs, whilst the complainant is strictly speaking a third party here in that you are not providing him a service here which he can complain of, we can address whether the firm has acted reasonably in pursuing these costs. For example, a firm could be penalised by this office if proceedings had been issued without having sent a bill beforehand."

To establish whether any complaint is within the time jurisdiction of LeO, they must record the date of the act or omission. It would be odd if they did not also note the date when the retainer ended.

If LeO fails to record such basic information, or records it but can not retrieve it save by the sort of outlay now being claimed, then it cannot be 'fit for purpose'. If, however, it both records the information and can retrieve it as easily as one would expect, then things are worse than they appear - this means LeO considers it appropriate to put forward the sort of justification used in this case as a pretext to deny a request, seemingly to avoid scrutiny of the way it goes about its business.

There is a bright side to all this since if LeO is able to recover from costs of information requests like this one, it will soon be self-funding. How nice would that be?

Chris Kilroy is a solicitor at Kilroys Solicitors

www.kilroys.co.uk