Complaints

At Specters, a trading name of The Specter Partnership Lta, we take complaints very seriously and are always extremely grateful for feedback, as this enables us to make changes to ensure that we provide the best possible service to all of our clients.

Generally, our clients prefer to raise any initial enquiries or any informal complaints with the person dealing with their claim by telephone, email or in writing. Any concerns can often be resolved within a few hours or days.

If, however, you would like to raise this further or speak to someone other than the person dealing with your complaint, you can contact our Client Care Officer, Emma Parkinson on 01925 428360. Emma will be more than happy to help to resolve any issues.

How to make a Formal Complaint

If you have a formal complaint, please write to us with details, addressing your letter to:

Mrs Emma Parkinson

The Specter Partnership Ltd
850 lbis Court
Lakeside drive
Centre Court
Warrington
WA1 1RL

Email: e.parkinson@specters.co.uk

Our complaints procedure must be accessible by all and therefore, if you are unable to detail your complaint in writing or need some assistance in doing so, please contact Emma Parkinson on 01925 428360 to discuss alternative ways of communicating with us.

What Happens Next?

1. We will send you a letter acknowledging receipt of your complaint within 3 days of receiving it enclosing a copy of our
   Complaints Procedure.
2. We will investigate your complaint. This will normally involve passing your complaint to our client care officer, Mrs Emma Parkinson, who will investigate your complaint and speak to the member of staff dealing with your file. We may ask you to provide additional information, if we feel it is necessary to properly investigate your complaint.
3. Once we have examined your file, spoken to any relevant parties and completed our investigation we will send you, within 21 days of acknowledging your complaint, a detailed written response, which will include any suggestions for resolving your complaint.
4. If you are not happy with our response, you can then ask us to review our decision. You will need to let us know any aspects of our response with which you are not satisfied and provide any further comments or documents you wish us to consider.
5. Your complaint with be reviewed by either a Partner or our consultant Gareth Williams within 21 days of your request for a review.
6. You will not be charged for any of the work we carry out investigating your complaint.
7. If we have to change the timescales, we will let you know and explain why.

Further Advice

If we have been unable to settle your complaint using our internal complaints process, you have the right to complain to either the Legal Ombudsman, an independent complaints body, established under the Legal Services Act 2007, that deals
with legal services complaints for complaints about the service we have provided to you, or to our Regulator, the Solicitor’s Regulation Authority (SRA) where you have concerns about our behaviour, for example, if you consider that we have been dishonest, deliberately overcharged you, taken or lost your money or treated you unfairly because of your age, disability or other characteristic.

Complaints about our Service

The Legal Ombudsman can investigate complaints within 6 months of you receiving our final response to your complaint and no more than one year from the act or omission being complained about, or no more than one year from the date when you should reasonably have known there was cause for complaint.

The Legal Ombudsman can be contacted at:

The Legal Ombudsman
PO Box 6167
Slough
SL1 0EH

Tel: 0300 555 0333

Email: enquiries@legalombudsman.org.uk

www.legalombudsman.org.uk

Complaints about our

The SRA can investigate complaints about our behaviour. The SRA can be contacted at:

The SRA
199 Wharfside Street|
Birmingham
81 1RN

Email: report@sra.org.uk

Guidance on making a complaint to the SRA can be found at www.sra.org.uk or by telephoning the SRA’s Contact Centre on 0370 606 2555 or by email contactcentre@sra.org.uk
Alternative complaints bodies such as ProMediate also exist, which are competent to deal with complaints about legal services should both you and our firm wish to use
such a scheme.