SRA response

Legal Ombudsman discussion paper: Transparency and Reporting Impact

Published on 19 December 2019

Read the Discussion paper: Transparency and Reporting Impact.

Thank you for the opportunity to respond to your Transparency and Reporting Impact discussion paper.

As you know from our discussions, we are supportive of your aim to improve transparency. Access to good quality information can support consumers (individuals and businesses) to make appropriate choices about which legal services provider can best meet their needs. We agree that publishing more information about your work and decision-making can help consumers to make these choices. It may also help the profession to identify areas for improvement in the service they provide to their customers, driving up standards.

In relation to contextualising your decisions with firm-based data, option four in your paper, we agree that this would help consumers interpret and understand the data provided. We are happy to continue our discussions about how best we can support you to do that.

Your discussion paper notes the breadth of your data and your aim to offer detail of complaints to regulators and the profession to help to identify areas of weakness in  service provision. I know that our thematic team is keen to explore how to use this data to carry out a review of service complaints in relation to SRA regulated firms, so that we can understand any regulatory or competency issues and support firms to deliver the high quality service their customers expect.

And as you know, now that we have implemented our Transparency Rules and new Standards and Regulations, our focus has moved to monitoring and evaluating our reforms. This is an important piece of work which I know will benefit from the complaints data and insight LeO has to offer. I look forward to continuing to work together on this over the coming years.

I hope you find this short submission helpful.