COMPLAINTS HANDLING PROCEDURE

Our complaints policy

 We are committed to providing a high-quality service to our clients. This includes a commitment to putting things right when they go wrong. This policy explains how we will deal with any complaint that is referred to us. Your complaint might concern the way in which you have been dealt with, the quality of advice you have received or any invoice that you have received.

Our complaints procedure

 If you have a complaint, please contact Mohil Patel. You can contact him by post at this office, or by e-mail at mohil@linkslegal.co.uk,  It is preferable that you do put your concerns into writing, but if you would prefer not to, or if you would find it difficult to do so, he can be contacted by phone at 02085510999.

What will happen next?

• On receipt of your complaint, Mohil Patel/Jitesh Patel will send you a letter acknowledging your complaint and might invite you to a meeting to discuss your concerns. We will open a file for your complaint in our system and Mohil Patel/Jitesh Patel will examine the file that we have on the work that we have been doing for you. We would look to acknowledge your complaint within 7 days of receiving it and will complete our initial examination within a further 21 days.

• We might then invite you to a meeting or we will write to you to ask for further information. Alternatively we might write to you setting out our views on the situation and suggesting any redress that we would feel to be appropriate. We will aim to write to you with our views and any suggestions within seven days of completing our investigations.

• Where we feel that we have failed in our standards, we could offer an apology, a reduction of any bill or a repayment in relation to any payment received.

• If, by this stage, you are still not satisfied, please let us  It would be helpful to us if you could do so within the next 21 days but there is no obligation on you to do so. We will then arrange to review our decision. We would generally aim to do this within 14 days of hearing from you. We will usually do this by asking another partner in this firm to review the file that we have on your complaint and see if they agree with our response.

• We will let you know the result of the review within 7 days of the end of the review and will do so by writing to you to confirm our final position on your complaint and explaining our reasons.

• You may, if you wish, approach the Legal Ombudsman who provides a service examining complaints against lawyers, including solicitors’ firms. They expect us to have concluded our examination of your complaint within eight weeks and will usually expect to have complaints referred to him within six months of the end of our complaints handling process as set out above. The services provided by the Legal Ombudsman are limited to individuals and smaller organisations – for more details see his website. The full details of how to contact this office are as follows:

Telephone: 0300 555 0333

Minicom: 0300 555 1777

E-mail: enquiries@legalombudsman.org.uk Website: www.legalombudsman.org.uk

Address: Legal Ombudsman, PO Box 6167, Slough, SL1 0EH

• You must refer to the Legal Ombudsman within One year of the problem you are complaining about happening; or.
• You must bring the complaint forward within One year of becoming aware of this problem.

Thank you for bringing your concerns to our attention. We will do our best to address any dissatisfaction that you have experienced in using the services of this firm. Our primary objective is to put things right.

If you are unhappy with our behaviour:

The Solicitors Regulation Authority (‘SRA’) can help if you are concerned about our behaviour. This could be for things like dishonesty, taking or losing your money or treating you unfairly because of your age, a disability or other characteristics.

Visit the ‘Reporting an individual or firm’ page of their website to see how you can raise your concerns with the SRA

To explain to you how long this process might take we have included our target times for each stage of the process. Where, for any reason, it is not possible to observe any of these limits we will let you know and explain why.