Complaints Policy
Although we will always do our best to provide you with the service you need, we do accept that occasionally things go wrong and you may wish to raise a complaint.
If you have a complaint, please contact the person with whom you have been dealing or the principal partner who has been overseeing your transaction. You will find this information in the Client Engagement Letter which was sent to you when we first started working for you. They will try to resolve all the issues to your satisfaction. However, if you are still unhappy about our service, please contact our Complaints Partner - Alan Bultitude at St John’s Property Lawyers, 22a, The Avenue, Watford, Hertfordshire WD17 4NS. You may email Alan Bultitude at: alanB@sj-propertylawyers.co.uk
What will happen next?
We will send you a letter acknowledging your complaint and, if necessary, we will ask you to confirm or explain the details set out. We will try to respond within 7 working days of receiving your complaint. We will record your complaint in our central register which is held within our electronic case management system. We will then thoroughly investigate your complaint with a view to resolving any outstanding issues. We will endeavour to do this within 14 working days of sending you the acknowledgement letter. At this stage, if you are still not satisfied you can write to us again. We will then arrange to review our decision and a different partner, will conduct the review. If we do not hear from you after 28 days, we will write to inform you that we are closing our complaints file. We will try to let you know the result of the review within 5 working days of the end of the review. At this time we will write to you confirming our final position on your complaint and explaining our reasons. If we have to change any of the timescales above, we will let you know and explain why. If you are still dissatisfied with the response you may wish to complain in writing to the Legal Ombudsman.
The time for making a complaint to the Legal Ombudsman is 6 years from the date of the act or omission on which the complaint is based, or 3 years from when the complainant should have known about the complaint (if the act or omission took place before 6 October 2010 or was more than 6 years ago).
The address of the Legal Ombudsman is: Legal Ombudsman, PO Box 6806, Wolverhampton, WV1 9WJ
Tel: 0300 555 0333
E-mail: enquiries@legalombudsman.org.uk
Website: www.legalombudsman.org.uk
Ordinarily, a complainant cannot use the Legal Ombudsman unless the complainant has first used our complaints procedure. A complainant can use the Legal Ombudsman if:
a. the complaint has not been resolved to the complainant’s satisfaction within 8 weeks of being made to us; or
b. an ombudsman considers that there are exceptional reasons to consider the complaint sooner, or without it having been made first to us; or
c. where an ombudsman considers that in-house resolution is not possible due to irretrievable breakdown in the relationship between us and the person making the complaint.
Please note that the Legal Ombudsman’s Rules are subject to amendment periodically and if you wish to make a complaint to the Legal Ombudsman, you should refer to the version in force at that time. The rules can be accessed at www.legalombudsman.org.uk/about-us/#scheme-rules
In addition there are some circumstances, for example situations of fraud, a failure to account for money received on your behalf and the making of mistakes (negligence) by St John’s which may entitle you to claim compensation – for further information on making claims of this type please go to: https://www.clc-uk.org/consumers/compensation