Complaining about your legal adviser - Step 1
To start with, the best thing you can do if you start having problems with the service your legal adviser is giving you is to communicate. Talk to your legal adviser face to face, call them up, put it in an email, write it down. However you do it, just make sure your legal adviser or someone else at the firm you are using is told what you are not happy about.
Sometimes this can help to clear the air, and they will have the chance to put things right. If it doesn't work, you should make things official and make a complaint to the legal adviser or the firm they work for.
Get things put in writing at this stage, and give them a chance to take the complaint on board and reply to you. You can use a template complaint letter. The legal services regulators require providers to have procedures for handling complaints like this.
Complaining about your legal adviser - Step 2
After making a complaint, if things still aren’t sorted, you might decide to get in touch with the Legal Ombudsman. You can't complain to the Legal Ombudsman until you have first complained to the firm.
The Legal Ombudsman can help if you’ve had problems with the service you received from a regulated legal service provider.
If the complaint is about a regulated legal adviser and related to misconduct or breach of the regulator's rules, as opposed to service, then their regulator can look into this.
The Legal Ombudsman
This is an independent service that is free to use, and that can look at your side of the story as well as the legal adviser's.
The Legal Ombudsman can look at service complaints about regulated legal services providers, such as delays in getting your work done, not releasing documents to you and not keeping you informed about the progress of the work they are doing. Once the Legal Ombudsman has made a decision about your complaint, the provider must comply with it.
To find out more, you can take a look at the Legal Ombudsman's website. You will find information about how it can help you, as well as template letters, guides and support to help you at the different stages of the complaint process.