Solicitors to face £5,000 fines for sloppy service

Solicitors who provide a sloppy service should be fined five times the current level to end the "cavalier" approach to complaints, a report, part-funded by the Office for the Supervision of Solicitors (OSS), has recommended.

The report, published yesterday, proposes that maximum fines, or compensation orders, should be raised from £1,000 to £5,000 to bring the fining regime for solicitors in line with the small claims court. The Institute of Advanced Legal Studies concluded that there was "little convincing evidence" that the current system had changed the attitude of firms to 'service'. It said: "Clients have often had to deal with a hostile solicitor's firm and a dramatic loss of faith in the professional dealing with them."

Random client comments referred to in the report suggested that nothing had changed since the bad old days of the Solicitors Complaints Bureau, the forerunner of OSS, when the perception was that solicitors investigating solicitors always looked after themselves. The institute found: "The occasionally cavalier attitude of practitioners to clients' complaints and OSS investigations is shocking."

Under the current system a solicitor can be ordered to pay compensation up to £1,000 to a client if the OSS finds that a solicitor is guilty of "inadequate professional service". The OSS backlog of complaints is now running at 13,500. Earlier this month the Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine of Lairg, described the backlog as "deeply, deeply troubling".

Lord Irvine said that only 51 per cent of complaints reported to the OSS were being dealt with inside three months, well short of the 90 per cent target. Lord Irvine is concerned that the Law Society, which fundsthe OSS, is failing as a regulator. He has warned that if it does not get its house in order by the end of the year he will bring in a statutory complaints system.