If you have a complaint, please contact Julien Rutler or Craig Themis, who are both directors of RLS Solicitors Limited and you can write to either person at our main office address detailed in our letterhead and emails.
What Will Happen Next?
- We will send you a letter acknowledging your complaint and asking you to confirm or explain the details of your complaint if these are not already clear to us. We will also let you know the name of the person who will be dealing with your complaint. You can expect to receive our letter within approximately five working days of us receiving your complaint.
- We will then record your complaint in our central register.
- We will acknowledge your reply to our acknowledgement letter and confirm what will happen next. You can expect to hear from us within five working days of your reply confirming and explaining the details of your complaint.
- We will then start to investigate your complaint. This may involve one or more of the following steps:
- we may ask the member of staff who acted for you to reply to your complaint;
- we may examine the reply and the information in your complaint file. We may then ask the member of staff for more information which we will obtain as soon as reasonably practicable.
- We may invite you to meet Craig Themis or Julien Rutler or another partner to discuss and, it is hoped, resolve your complaint. If we think this is necessary or appropriate we will do this within five working days of receiving all the details we need from the member of staff who acted for you.
- Within five working days of any meeting with you, we will write to you to confirm what took place and any proposals we have agreed with you. If you do not want a meeting or we do not think a meeting will assist matters, we will send you a detailed reply to your complaint. This will include our suggestions for resolving the matter. This will happen within five working days of us completing the investigation.
- At this stage, if you are still not satisfied you can write to us again. We will then arrange to review our decision. This will happen in one of the following ways:
- The partner who wrote to you will review his own decision within five working days;
- We will arrange for a partner in the firm who has not been involved in your complaint to review it. He or she will do this within 10 working days; or
- We will invite you to agree to independent mediation. We will let you know how long this process is likely to take.
- We will let you know the result of the review within five working days of the end of the review which we shall deal with in a timely manner. At this time we will write to you confirming our final position on your complaint and explaining our reasons.
- The Legal Ombudsman can help you if we are unable to resolve your complaint ourselves. They will look at your complaint independently and it will not affect how we handle your case.
Before accepting a complaint for investigation, the Legal Ombudsman will check that you have tried to resolve your complaint with us first. If you have, then you must take your complaint to the Legal Ombudsman:
- No more than one year from the date of the act or omission being complained about; or
- No more than one year from when you should have realised there was cause for complaint;
and
- Within six months of receiving a final response to your complaint.
If you would like more information about the Legal Ombudsman, please contact them.
Contact details
Visit: www.legalombudsman.org.uk
Call: 0300 555 0333 (from the UK); +44 121 245 3050 (from overseas) between 9.00 to 16.00 Monday to Friday.
Email: enquiries@legalombudsman.org.uk
Address: Legal Ombudsman, PO Box 6167, Slough SL1 0EH
- The Solicitors Regulation Authority can help if you are concerned about our behaviour. This could be for things like dishonesty, taking or losing your money or treating you unfairly because of your age, a disability or other characteristic.
Visit their website to see how you can raise your concerns with the Solicitors Regulation Authority.
