Official sources
Check the current source material.
- SRA - reporting a solicitor or firm
- SRA - assessment threshold
- Legal Ombudsman - complain to your provider
- SRA, report a solicitor or firm
ConsumerWise explains these materials in plain English. Check the live source where a deadline, rule about what the body can deal with or legal requirement may have changed.
Keep redress in the right route.
Do not report the litigation just because you dislike the other side.
Where the solicitor acts for an opponent, a disagreement with the opponent’s legal position is not itself misconduct. A regulatory report needs a professional-conduct issue capable of proof. The SRA applies an Assessment Threshold Test that asks whether there may be a breach, whether it is sufficiently serious to justify regulatory action, and whether it is capable of proof.
Separate service from conduct.
Slow communication, failure to follow instructions, poor advice or unreasonable delay may be service issues suitable for the provider’s complaint process and Legal Ombudsman. Serious dishonesty, misuse of client money, conflicts, misleading conduct or other regulatory risks may engage the SRA. The same factual event can sometimes raise both, but neither route replaces the other.
What this hub is for.
A complaint about a solicitor can involve three separate questions: the quality of the service, professional/regulatory conduct, and your private legal rights. Legal Ombudsman, SRA and the courts do different jobs.
Guides and tools
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Do not collapse different problems into one complaint.
Separate the underlying transaction or service dispute from any data-protection, credit-reporting, complaint-handling or professional-conduct issue. They can arise from the same events while using different legal frameworks and different escalation routes. This separation is one of the easiest ways to keep a complex case understandable.
Separate poor service from regulatory conduct and legal liability.
A complaint about delay, communication, costs information or service quality should normally be made to the legal service provider first and may later fall within the Legal Ombudsman’s jurisdiction. Serious professional conduct concerns can engage the SRA where it regulates the solicitor or firm. A negligence or other civil claim is a separate legal route again.
These routes should not be collapsed into one accusation. State which facts support the service complaint, which facts are said to raise regulatory concerns, and whether any legal loss is being pursued separately.
The internal complaint creates the record for later escalation.
Ask the firm to identify the complaint issues, findings, evidence and final position. Legal service providers generally have up to eight weeks to deal with the complaint before the Legal Ombudsman route becomes available if the matter remains unresolved. Keep the final response because later referral time limits can run from it.