This article is part of LeO News, edition 24.
This is a round-up of the Legal Ombudsman's latest news.
The Office for Legal Complaints is pleased to announce the appointments of Paul McFadden as Chief Ombudsman and Sandra Strinati as Chief Operating Officer of the Legal Ombudsman (LeO). Elisabeth Davies, Chair of OLC, welcomed Paul and Sandra to the organisation.
She said: “They will revitalise and further strengthen the restructured leadership team and I am confident Paul and Sandra will lead LeO in both stabilising operational delivery and testing innovative ways to deliver the service more efficiently”. Paul and Sandra will be joining LeO in the new year.
You can read more here.
Our website offers a more modern and user-friendly browsing experience. Legal service providers can find complaints handling resources here. These include: Training and events, Preventing complaints, Good complaints handling and The LeO process. We’ve also aimed to make it clearer for consumers to understand the complaints process and what they need to do at each stage.
The Legal Ombudsman publishes data for every final ombudsman decision that is made. In 2018 we published the Better Information research which highlighted that we needed to do more with the data to ensure consumers understand the outcome of the complaints process. The data has been updated to make the following more clear - what we decided about a service provider’s initial service, and whether the ombudsman decided the first-tier complaints handling was reasonable.
You can view the ombudsman decision data here.
We have published a report to offer greater insight into the nature of complaints we receive, common issues we see, and resolution trends. It includes case studies to show real life examples. To view the full report, please click here.
We understand it can be difficult for service providers to know what approach to take when faced with behaviour that might be unacceptable. This guidance is intended to support service providers when they are responding to challenging situations and to understand the approach the ombudsman would expect.
You can read the guidance here.
