Legal complaints

David Buchanan-cook, head of oversight at the Scottish Legal Complaints Commission, vividly illustrates some of the weaknesses regarding the redress mechanisms available to clients whose lawyers peddled appalling service (“For a small number of clients, the redress remains unmet”, Law & Legal Affairs, 5 June).

The SLCC, he tells us, “awarded just over £325,000 to legal consumers who experienced poor levels of service”.

That statistic suggests that “poor service” is far from uncommon, and arguably undermines his subsequent contention that “most lawyers in Scotland do an excellent job”.

In-house “regulation”, by definition, is suffused with innate and therefore unavoidable bias. After complaints have been “investigated” by the in-house operatives, the solicitors, advocates and QCS, whose conduct prompted the complaints, are usually totally exonerated – even when that conduct was self-evidently appalling.

The creation of the SLCC was in part a political response to the fact that self-regulation and in-house “investigations” of complaints was a farce regarding effective redress, but frenetic lobbying by the legal establishment ensured that conduct complaints remained in-house – thereby thwarting the creation of a fully effective complaints system.

Mr Cook informed us that “the Scottish Government recently launched a longanticipated review of legal regulation in Scotland – a review which will include the legal complaints process”. Implicitly, the “review” is a tacit admission by the Scottish Government that the existing legal complaints process favours lawyers.

The legal establishment wants to keep it that way and every trick in the book will be deployed to thwart the creation of an objective “legal complaints process”.

Only a lawyer-free complaints process will suffice – otherwise bias will seep into the process and deplorable conduct will continue to be tolerated.

THOMAS CROOKS Dundas Street, Edinburgh