Overview of statistics - six months to 31 March 2011

We are learning a lot – and getting better at what we do - as we gain more experience of resolving complaints. We also know that there are seasonal variations in what we see coming through to us – but as we've only been open six months, we don't know exactly what these look like yet.

These first statistics are only indicative of our future volumes and patterns in complaints. We predicted what we would see come to the new scheme based on evidence from other schemes that most closely matched the sorts of issues we were likely to see in resolving legal complaints. We knew these would be imperfect and that it would take time for us to understand the volumes and nature of the complaints we see – and from that develop a reasonable way of measuring our performance.

We are more confident of the trends that we can draw from the three months from January to March 2011. These stats seem, from closer analysis, to be less affected by seasonable variations, but it will not be until we are closer to having a full year of experience that we will be able to predict any trends. We want to resolve complaints as quickly and fairly as possible, and understanding the volumes we are likely to see year on year, and the causes of any fluctuations, will help equip us to face many of the future challenges we will see as the legal services market continues to evolve and change.

We are in the process of developing key performance indicators and will report against them in the future. You can see more information about this in our business plan (pdf - opens in a new window). The key indicators proposed are:

Timeliness (time taken to resolve complaints): For instance, the proportion resolved within three months of a consumer's first contact with the Ombudsman scheme.

Quality: We will track against a mix of quality indicators that focus on the accuracy of our work and the quality of customer service provided.

Stakeholder satisfaction: We will commission external, independent measurement of satisfaction levels among customers (consumers and lawyers) and stakeholders on an annual basis.

Unit cost:We propose to track the unit cost of our work by reporting the annual cost of the organisation averaged according to the number of cases accepted for resolution.

Number of people who have contacted us from 6 October to 31 March 2011

Contacts	Cases opened
38,155	3,768

In the six months since we opened, 38,155 people contacted us by phone, email and letter. Of these, we accepted 3,768 complaints into the Ombudsman scheme for investigation. This is a ratio of 10:1 contacts to cases. Other Ombudsman schemes have higher and lower contact-to-case ratios. We will continue to monitor this over time.

Most people (70%) contacted us by phone, with the other 30% contacting us by letter or email.

The following graph illustrates the trends in people contacting us for our first six months. We saw high volumes of contacts initially, which we think is due to the publicity we achieved around our launch and also possibly due to a pent-up demand, with people choosing to wait to contact a new, independent, Ombudsman scheme rather than complaining under the old arrangements. There is also a seasonal variation to the numbers of people contacting us – you can see the large dip over the Christmas period in the graph. We are monitoring the volumes of contacts and cases closely, but these statistics suggest that it is too early to tell what volumes we will see in the future.

Contact Activity

In our Assessment Centre, we have a service level that says we will answer 80% of calls within 20 seconds. We hit this level for our first six months, with a steady improvement month by month to March 2010.

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What are the complaints about?

The Legal Ombudsman, is here to resolve complaints made by consumers of legal services. In our first six months saw most complaints about areas such as buying and selling houses, wills and probate, family law and personal injury. And some things consumers are concerned about – delay and cost, for instance – come up regularly across all these different sorts of legal services. But failure to advise and failure to follow instructions are the most common categories of complaint.

Cases Accepted for Investigation by Area of Law

Complaint Categories

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Number of cases we accepted

The table below shows the number of contacts to our Assessment Centre and the number of cases we have accepted for investigation month by month in our first six months.

The trend in cases accepted changed over the six-month period, and appears to be on an upwards trend. We accepted 27 complaints a day in October 2010 and this was up to us accepting 34 complaints per day in March 2011.

The proportion of cases accepted is likely to have increased over time for a number of reasons. For instance, when we opened, we were contacted by many people who had complaints that were outside our scheme rules because of the age of the issues that they were raising. Also, in our early days, we asked many people to raise their complaint with their lawyers first, explaining that we were only able to help if they could not resolve the complaint with their lawyer first of all. We are now starting to see some of those people come back to us, which may be why we are seeing the volumes of cases we are accepting for investigation increasing over time.

We are monitoring these numbers to help us forecast and plan our work. For all the reasons we have described, we think that the three months from January to March 2010 is likely to give us a better sense of the future numbers of cases we might see. If we take these figures, and multiply them to show volumes for a full year, then we may see 78,224 people contact us. But this figure is indicative only and is not foolproof, which is why we are tracking it over time.

Call & Case Activity - Go live to date	Oct 2010	Nov 2010	Dec 2010	Jan 2011	Feb 2011	Mar 2011	Total since 6 Oct
Number of Contacts	6,437	7,293	4,869	6,507	6,302	6,747	38,155
Number of Cases Accepted	490	655	564	641	632	786	3,768

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Number of cases we resolved

It takes time for a case to come to a conclusion. Depending on the issues in a case - it can be harder or easier to gather information to help us be clear about the facts so we can help resolve the complaint. Sometimes, because people live overseas, are away, or simply have busy lives, it can take time for us to hear back from them and to talk through the issues. And, sometimes, the right way forward is to go carefully through all the stages of our process, as this is what is needed to come to a fair resolution. We are still learning about how all these different factors can impact on the time it takes us to resolve complaints, to check if our planning about how we should approach our work needs to change over time.

As you would expect, in our first six months, we accepted more cases than we closed – but the trend is that this gap is lessening over time. There is a graph below that shows this is happening. This is partly because we are becoming more expert as we mature as an organisation. We anticipate that we will see a higher number of closed cases in the future as we move out of our start-up phase.

In the six months since we opened, we resolved a total of 1,450 cases.

Trends of Cases accepted and closed

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How we resolved the cases

Informal resolution
The approach we take to resolving complaints will depend on the individual facts of a case – and by the level of formality required to resolve a case. If you would like to get more of a feel for the approach we take, you can read some stories about the types of cases we have resolved here.

Where possible, we prefer to resolve complaints informally – getting both sides to agree with the views and analysis of our investigators to reach an informal resolution as early as possible. So far, we have resolved the majority of the cases we have closed by informal resolution.

Cases where it is simply not possible to reach an informal resolution may require a more formal process and, after a detailed investigation, are referred to one of our eight ombudsmen for a final decision. We are still learning about the patterns and numbers of cases that require an Ombudsman's decision.

The table below shows upwards trend in the number of cases closed or resolved and the number of Ombudsman decisions made each month for our first six months.


Cases requiring an Ombudsman's decision
During our first six months of operation, the number of cases requiring a formal Ombudsman decision grew over time. We made our first Ombudsman decision in December 2010 (you can read it here). The graph above shows we are seeing a trend upwards in the numbers of Ombudsman decisions we are making.

So far, 103 of the cases we have closed were resolved this way. It is too early to predict a final pattern for the numbers of complaints that will need a formal decision. It will change as we receive more cases and they progress to resolution.

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Operational performance - timeliness

We want to resolve complaints as quickly and fairly as possible.

We want to resolve complaints as quickly and fairly as possible. In our first six months, we resolved 55% of cases within three months of a consumer's first contact with us, 76% within four months and 92% within five months.

We measure the time taken to resolve cases from the point at which consumers contact us with a complaint that is within our jurisdiction to the point at which we resolve the case. This measure is more challenging than starting the clock running from the time we accept a complaint. We think this is a fairer reflection of the experience of our customers. The time it takes to resolve a complaint is also determined to a large extent by the parties to the dispute themselves. If a case can be resolved informally, it tends to take less time than if a lengthier investigation or an Ombudsman's decision is needed.

The time it takes to resolve a complaint is also determined to a large extent by the parties to the dispute themselves. If a case can be resolved informally, it tends to take less time than if a lengthier investigation or an Ombudsman's decision is needed.

We will continue to track how long it takes us to resolve complaints. From this we will develop some key performance indicators so we can measure our service levels and also help consumers and lawyers understand what they can expect from us if they have a complaint. We think that we will become even quicker as we become more experienced at resolving complaints.

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Process improvement

We want to keep improving our processes and the resulting outcomes for our customers. We are going through an operational review at the moment, with the aim of refining and developing our processes. We recognise that there will always be scope to learn and improve. This objective reflects our desire to take every opportunity to improve our ways of working in order to provide an increasingly efficient and effective service, being aware of the impact that our activities have on all our customers and ensuring that customers receive the best possible service.

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Quality

We are committed to improving the quality and consistency of our work. We have put in place a quality assurance framework that specifies and reinforces the quality standards which we have set ourselves. It helps us monitor and evaluate our performance, identifying issues where we can improve what we do and how we do it.

Our small quality team are working with assessors, investigators and Ombudsmen to ensure the quality of communication, adherence to process and the thoroughness of our investigations. We will report against this area, as one of our key performance indicators in the future.

We have not yet had any judicial reviews of our process or a challenge to one of our decisions.

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Satisfaction

We are in the process of commissioning an external, independent organisation to measure satisfaction levels among our customers and stakeholders on an annual basis, supplemented by quarterly monitoring. In the meantime, we will do some smaller surveys to measure satisfaction with how we communicate with our customers.

We recently commissioned some research asking consumers and lawyers about their perceptions and expectations of how complaints about legal services should be resolved. From this we learned that many of our assumptions in setting up the Legal Ombudsman have met customer needs. Our approach of asking people to call us, so we can listen to their concerns and talk about how to tackle them, is preferred. Consumers told us that they did not want to face bureaucracy or fill in long and complicated forms.

Both consumers and lawyers told us that they wanted to try to resolve things informally wherever possible as it is quicker and is less emotionally testing for everyone involved.

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Our service

Just like the lawyers whose complaints we resolve, we have our own formal complaints procedure for people who are unhappy with the level of service we have provided. Recognising any shortcomings and learning from these mistakes will help us improve our service – and it is part of our commitment to quality.

These complaints about us are looked into by our dedicated compliance team. This team has received 27 complaints about our service (two per cent of our total number of cases). Fourteen per cent of these complaints were made by lawyers and the others were from consumers or their representatives.

If our compliance team are unable to resolve a complaint about our service, it can be referred to our independent service adjudicator for a formal review of the service we have provided. Our adjudicator took up post in March 2011, and we will publish more information about his findings in the future.

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Our budget and productivity

We are funded by an annual levy paid for by the lawyers and law firms that we cover – and by case fees that we can charge law forms for resolving disputes referred to us about them.

The number of cases we take on each month fluctuates naturally with consumer demand. In addition our costs during the first six months of operation included ongoing costs relating to the set up of the organisation. This makes reporting on the cost per case inappropriate during our initial period as our cost base includes one-off costs and we do not have a full year's operation to average out seasonal peaks and troughs. We also expect, as our team of new investigators and assessors mature into their roles, that we will become more effective.

As the organisation matures we expect the cost per case to become more representative.

We are currently looking at our unit cost and benchmarking it against other schemes. Over time we believe that our unit cost will come down as we become even more effective at resolving complaints.

The Legal Ombudsman was set up to simplify the system for redress for the legal services market. We operate within a budget of £19.9m – a more efficient operation compared with the cost of the old system, which was estimated at £32.5m by independent analysis commissioned by the Ministry of Justice in 2006-2007. You can read more about our forecasts and budget in our Business Plan (pdf - opens in a new window).

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What have we learned from our first six months?

The key conclusion we can draw from our first six months is that poor communication is at the heart of many disputes between lawyers and their customers. We are seeing cases where a clear, non-legalistic, helpful and early response to the issues raised would have resolved misunderstandings and is likely to have prevented the complaint to the Legal Ombudsman in the first place. You can read some case studies here, which illustrate the sorts of issues that we see.

What these statistics don't show is that we have also begun to notice complaints which don't always fit easily into our jurisdiction. We are seeing more people coming to us after thinking they have used a lawyer – only to realise the service they bought was from an unregulated practitioner or from a business model that does not fall within our jurisdiction. More and more we are finding examples where this is not the case. We are looking into this more, so we can feedback to regulators and government the sorts of issues we are seeing so they can think about potential solutions to these issues.

Our first six months have taught us a great deal about our role. We are pleased that we have been able to deal with the core of our work – resolving complaints about lawyers – in a way that has, even in these early days, lived up to at least some of the aspirations of Parliament for a single port of call to resolve legal complaints quickly and informally (see our stories). It is now our job to make our service even better, and to pick up on the broader issues we are seeing to seek to bring more fairness into the legal services market.

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