Legal Complaints Service postpones decision on plan to publish complaints

The Legal Complaints Service (LCS) is to postpone a decision on whether to publish details of adjudicated complaints of inadequate professional service against solicitors' firms.

Deborah Evans, chief executive of the LCS, said more time was needed for the practical hurdles facing the scheme to be overcome.

The results of a consultation on the plan, which is strongly opposed by the Law Society, are due to be published later this month.

However, Evans said, bearing in mind the issues raised by the consultation, the board of the LCS, which consists of seven solicitors and seven non-solicitors, would not make a final decision on the scheme until September.

'We are aware what a big decision this is, and we are very keen to get it right', she told Solicitors Journal.

Instead Evans said next week's board meeting would focus on how to overcome difficulties, such as whether the LCS had sufficient data on the work carried out by firms to put complaints against them into context. She said that the board would also need to consider whether now was the right time to introduce the scheme, given that the LCS has only two years to run before its replacement by the Office for Legal Complaints, which will regulate barristers and legal executives as well as solicitors.

A further difficulty, Evans said, was the impact of publishing complaints on diversity, since most of the work generating individual complaints is carried out by small and medium-sized firms, with higher than average numbers of female and ethnic minority lawyers.

'We think that publishing complaints is positive for the profession and the consumer,' said Evans.

'Firms may be more willing to concentrate on conciliation, rather than letting complaints go to adjudication. However, we will be treading as carefully as we can.'

She said one way forward might be for the LCS to agree on summaries of complaints with law firms before publishing them.

Des Hudson, chief executive of the Law Society described the plan to publish complaints as 'ill conceived' and predicted that it would fail abysmally in helping consumers decide between good and bad law firms. 'It helps no one,' he added.

In its response to the consultation, the Society argued that the move would disproportionally penalise firms with one adjudicated complaint, while doing nothing to improve the performance of the very small number of firms with many.

The Society warned that firms working in practice areas known to generate large numbers of complaints, such as immigration, mental health and child protection, could be pushed over the edge by publication.

'The knowledge that there is a risk of publication of these findings may prove the last straw for firms doing a conscientious job in these areas,' officials said.

It added that Article 8 of the ECHR provided for protection of an individual's private life, which had been interpreted as including their professional life and the right not to be defamed.