Regulation
Smith Sutcliffe is Authorised and Regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority No 55532.
Contact details for the SRA, including access to the Standards and Regulations can be found via the SRA website,
If you consider that any aspect of our dealings with your case may be in breach of these standards you can contact the SRA here
Insurance
We maintain first tier Professional Indemnity Insurance up to a limit of £2,000,000 as required by the Solictors Regulation Authority.
The Insurer is Portland Pii
The Policy Number is UKSOL 2100555
In certain circumstances the cover available to clients may be increased to £10,000,000. Please contact us to discuss insurance arrangements relating to specific work that we are undertaking for you.
Equality and Diversity
We have a comprehensive Equality and Diversity Policy in line with the requirements of our Regulator.
We are required to complete a biennial survey of our staff . The results of the 2021 survey were such that over a small sample it may be possible to identify individual members of staff. We have therefore opted not to publish the data on this occasion. This will be reviewed in 2023
Service Concerns
If you have concerns about our service, you should first of all address these to our Compliance Partner, Mr P G Halstead (paul.halsteadsmithsutcliffe.com) or at 50 Manchester Road Burnley BB11 1HJ. We will try to address your concerns to ensure that your matter continues as you would expect. If this does not produce a satisfactory outcome for you then you should address the issue through our complaints policy
Our complaints policy
SMITH SUTCLIFFE SOLICITORS
We are committed to providing a high-quality legal service to all our clients. When something goes wrong we need you to tell us about it. This will help us to improve our standards.
If you have a complaint, contact us with the details.
What will happen next
We will send you a letter acknowledging your complaint and may ask you to confirm or explain the details set out. 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 5 working days of us receiving your complaint.
We will record your complaint in our central register and open a separate file for your complaint. We will do this immediately on receiving your complaint.
We will then start to investigate your complaint. This will normally involve the following steps.
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The Client Care Partner, Mr Paul Halstead, will be responsible for reviewing the matter.
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He will ask the member of staff who acted for you to reply to your complaint within 5 working days.
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He will then examine the reply and the information in your complaint file.And, if necessary, he may also speak to the staff member.This will take up to 3 days from receiving the reply and the file.
He will either (a) send you a detailed reply to your complaint including any suggestions he might have to resolve the matter or (b) invite you to a meeting to discuss and hopefully resolve your complaint. He will do this within a further 3 days.
If you agree to a meeting he will within 2 days write to you to confirm what took place and any solutions he has agreed with you.
If you do not want a meeting he will send a detailed reply as mentioned above.
At this stage, if you are still not satisfied you should contact us again preferably in writing. We will then arrange to review our decision. This will happen in one of the following ways.
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Another partner of the firm will review Mr Halstead’s decision within 10 days from your further contact.
We will let you know the result of the review within 5 days of the end of the review. At this time we will write to you confirming our final position on your complaint and explaining our reasons. We are required to have completed this process within 8 weeks
If you are still not satisfied, you can contact the Legal Ombudsman Service who will review the steps that we have taken and look at ways to resolve the matter. You MUST make your initial contact with the Legal Ombudsman within 6 months of the date of our final response. The Legal Ombudsman can investigate complaints up to six years from the date of the problem happening or within three years of when you found out about the problem.
The Legal Ombudsman can be contacted at:
The Legal Ombudsman
PO Box 6806
Wolverhampton
WV1 9WJ
Tel 0300 555 0333
www.legalombudsman.org.uk for further details.
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The Legal Ombudsman
PO Box 6806
Wolverhampton
WV1 9WJ
Tel 0300 555 0333
www.legalombudsman.org.uk for further details.
VAT
Smith Sutcliffe is registerd for VAT. Our registration number is 174305475
