Client care
We are committed to delivering the best possible service to our clients. This means:
- responding quickly, flexibly, and creatively
- understanding your business and providing solutions to help you achieve success
- giving you a competitive price and transparency about our fees
- ensuring you are always kept up to date with developments in your cases
- providing you with a dedicated point of contact to ensure the right people provide you with the advice you need.
Here is just some of the recent feedback provided by our clients and partners:
"Firstly, can I please thank you for all your organisation and help over the course of this case. It has been an exemplar of how such matters should be run. My work has been really facilitated by this.”
– external counsel
“WLS keeps us informed throughout, gives sound advice, and will make the time to talk to us and go through the pros and cons in detail, and gives an honest view on the likely outcome. They have just been great throughout and I can't praise them enough.”
– external council client
Regarding Warwickshire Legal Services (WLS) delivering a bespoke training session to a client:
“Many thanks to you... it was as usual excellent and was really well received by everyone. I know how much work goes into preparing for a day's worth of training so am extremely grateful. Please pass on our thanks to the team.”
– police client
Experience and expertise
WLS has a wealth of public sector experience from over 20 years of practice, providing a wide range of legal services to local government and other public sector clients.
We have built many strong relationships over the years and have worked with external clients such as Warwickshire Police for more than 20 years. The depth of understanding that we have acquired about our public sector clients, and the environment in which they operate, allows us to bring a practical and problem-solving approach to the legal issues we deal with.
Customer care
We are committed to delivering excellent standards of customer care and have a customer care charter with all of our clients. Clients can expect to have a dedicated Business Partner with specific responsibility to manage your working relationship with WLS. They will also listen to your feedback to find out ways we can continue to improve the service and help to manage and reduce, where possible, your legal spend with us.
WLS is regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority and is also Lexcel accredited - this is the Law Society’s international practice management standard which certifies that quality standards have been met following an independent assessment.
Client confidentiality
We are very aware of the potential for conflicts of interest to arise when acting for other public sector bodies. We take extreme care in guarding against actual (and potential) conflicts of interest when providing legal advice to our clients to ensure that our professional obligations and our Client’s interests are not compromised in any way. In exceptional cases, this may mean that we are unable to act for individual external clients.
Complaints handling procedure
We like to hear what our clients think about our services, good or bad. It is always good to hear when things go right, but it is just as important for us to know if we get things wrong so that we have an opportunity to put them right if we can and make sure we learn from these situations. We regularly ask for feedback through our customer surveys and SLA review meetings. Our mature relationships with our clients tend to mean that they provide direct informal feedback to the fee-earner involved.
In the first instance it may be helpful to contact the person who is working on your case to discuss your concerns and we will do our best to resolve any issues. Any member of the public who wishes to make a complaint about WLS should also follow the Council’s corporate complaints procedure.
We want to give you the best possible service. However, if at any point you become unhappy or concerned about the service, we provided then you should inform us immediately, so that we can do our best to resolve the problem.
What to do if we cannot resolve your complaint
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:
- Within six months of receiving a final response to your complaint; and
- no more than six years from the date of act/omission; or
- no more than three years from when you should reasonably have known there was cause for complaint.
If you would like more information about the Legal Ombudsman, please contact them through the details provided below.
Web: Legal Ombudsman
Email: enquiries@legalombudsman.org.uk
Telephone: 0300 555 0333 (Between 9am and 5pm)
Post: Legal Ombudsman PO Box 6806, Wolverhampton, WV1 9WJ
What to do if you are unhappy with our behaviour
The Solicitors Regulation Authority can help if you wish to raise concerns about our behaviour.