Open and shrewd

Read our Chief Ombudsman, Adam Sampson's blog.

Critical friends

29 March 2011

If the Legal Ombudsman has been particularly quiet over the past few weeks, that is perhaps inevitable. One of the key messages I trotted out in speeches and meetings in the first half of last year was the message that we were a start-up, building an entire organisation from scratch. No matter how much we tried to learn from other organisations – our predecessor handlers of legal complaints or our fellow Ombudsman schemes – and no matter how carefully we planned, we would inevitably make mistakes. But we would not know what mistakes we were making at the time: it was only once we went live, I said, that we would find out what we had done wrong.

And, guess what: we are beginning to find out. Some of the glitches were clear from the start. We rapidly learned, for example, that the phone system we had bought (or rather had not bought but been given gratis as part of the overall IT package) was not capable of giving us the live customer contact information we needed to run a high-performing assessment process. Similarly, some of our assumptions about the way that demand showed itself or complainants and lawyers would act proved a bit wide of the mark.

Those issues were relatively ea sy to identify (although not necessarily so easy to fix: sourcing a new phone system and integrating with our existing IT offer cannot be done overnight; fortunately money at least is not an issue: the capital we had originally earmarked for a phone system was still unspent in our budget). We are also asking staff at all levels of the organisation what they think, as well as commissioning research into what our users – lawyers and complainants – think of us.

But inevitably, there are some things which will only be spotted by someone fresh to our business. Our post-launch review will see us ask some key outsiders to give us an honest critique of what we need to change. Some of that will be fairly formal: we have put together an advisory panel, chaired by the esteemed Sue Carr QC, and that includes representatives of consumer organisations and lawyers alike to give us some honest, and we hope, incisive feedback. We will also be road testing a selection of our letters and reports (anonymised, of course) with ordinary readers to learn more about how we need to be communicating with the public.

All of this will expose us to criticism; all is likely to be painful. But as I also say in my speeches, unless you are prepared to look at what your critics say about you, you will never learn how to improve.