We are committed to providing a high-quality legal service to all our clients. When something goes wrong, we need you to tell us about it. This will help us to improve our standards.

Our Complaints Procedure

If you have a complaint, please contact the Clerk of the chamber. You can contact him at: The Clerk, St Andrews Chambers, St Andrews House, 52, Manor Drive, Whetstone, London N20 0DX.

Our Clerk will pass your complaint to the Complaints Handler who will deal with your complaint.

What will happen now?

1. We will send you a letter acknowledging your complaint and asking you to confirm or explain the details set out. We will also let you know the details of the person who will be dealing with your complaint. Complaints are dealt with by Mr Sajid Sheikh, a Senior Solicitor and Managing Director of Sentinel Solicitors who is a designated independent complaint handler and does not work with St Andrews Chambers.

2. We will record your complaint in our central register and open a file for your complaint. We will do this as soon as possible.

3. We will start to investigate your complaint. This may involve one or more of the following steps.

We may ask the member of staff who acted for you to reply to your complaint within seven days.

We may examine their reply and the information in your complaint file. We may then ask them for more information. This will take up to five days from receiving their reply and the file.

We may invite you to meet the designated complaint handler Mr Sajid Sheikh to discuss and hopefully resolve your complaint if it practicable and appropriate.

4. Within two days of the meeting we will write to you to confirm what took place and any solutions we have agreed with you.

5. If we do not want a meeting or it is not possible, we will send you a detailed reply to your complaint. This will include our suggestions for resolving the matter. This will happen within five days of us completing our investigation.

6. At this stage, if you are still not satisfied you can contact us again. We will then arrange to review our decision. This will happen in one of the following ways.

The designated complaints handler will review his own decision within five days.

We will arrange, if possible, for someone else who has not been involved in your complaint to review it. They will do this within 10 days.

We will invite you to agree to independent mediation. We will let you know how long this process will take.

7. We will let you know the result of the review within five days of the end of the review. At this time, we will write to you confirming our final position on your complaint and explaining our reasons.

Our reply will set out following:

The nature and scope of the complaint;

The Complaints Handler’s conclusion on the complaint and basis of his conclusion;

If he finds that you are justified in your complaint then his proposal for resolving your complaint.

If we have to change any of the timescales above, we will let you know and explain why.

Confidentiality

8. All conversations and documents relating to the complaint will be treated as confidential and will be disclosed only to the extent that is necessary. Disclosure will be to the Head of Chambers, members of our management committee and to anyone involved in the complaint and its investigation. Such people will include the barrister member or staff who you have complained about, the head or relevant senior member of the panel and the person who investigates the complaint. The Bar Standards Board is entitled to inspect the documents and seek information about the complaint when discharging its auditing and monitoring functions.

Our Policy

9. As part of our commitment to client care we make a written record of any complaint and retain all documents and correspondence generated by the complaint for a period of six years. We scrutinise our conduct regularly with a view to improving services.

Complaints to the Legal Ombudsman

10. Please note that the Legal Ombudsman, the independent complaints body for service complaints about lawyers, has time limits in which a complaint must be raised with them.

The time limits are:

Six years from the date of the act/omission

Three years from the date that the complainant should reasonably have known there were grounds for complaint (if the act/omission took place before the 6 October 2010 or was more than six years ago)

Within six months of the complaint receiving a final response from their lawyer, if that response complies with the requirements in rule 4.4 of the Scheme Rules (which requires the response to include prominently an explanation that the Legal Ombudsman was available if the complainant remained dissatisfied and the provision of full contact details for the Ombudsman and a warning that the complaint must be referred to them within six months

11. The Ombudsman can extend the time limit in exceptional circumstances. Chambers must therefore have regard to that timeframe when deciding whether they are able to investigate your complaint. Chambers will not therefore usually deal with complaints that fall outside of the Legal Ombudsman's time limits.

12. The Ombudsman will also only deal with complaints from consumers. This means that only complaints from the barrister's client are within their jurisdiction. Non-clients who are not satisfied with the outcome of the Chambers' investigation should contact the Bar Standards Board rather than the Legal Ombudsman

13. It should be noted that it may not always be possible to investigate a complaint brought by a non-client. This is because the ability of Chambers to satisfactorily investigate and resolve such matters is limited and complaints of this nature are often better suited to the disciplinary processes maintained by the Bar Standards Board. Therefore, Chambers will make an initial assessment of the complaint and if they feel that the issues raised cannot be satisfactorily resolved through the Chambers complaints process they will refer you to the Bar Standards Board.

14. If you are unhappy with the outcome of our investigation and you fall within their jurisdiction you may take up your complaint with the Legal Ombudsman, the independent complaints body for complaints about lawyers, at the conclusion of our consideration of your complaint. The Ombudsman is not able to consider your complaint until it has first been investigated by Chambers. Please note the timeframe for referral of complaints to the Ombudsman as set out at paragraph 10 above.

You can write to them at:

Legal Ombudsman

PO Box 6806,

Wolverhampton

WV1 9WJ

Telephone number: 0300 555 0333

Email: enquiries@legalombudsman.org.uk

15. Barristers in chambers are regulated by the Bar Standards Board.

Bar Standards Board

Professional Conduct Department

289-293 High Holborn

London

WC1V 7JZ

16. You can search the Barristers’ Register on the Bar Standards Board’s website: https://www.barstandardsboard.org.uk/regulatory-requirements/the-barristers'-register/.

This shows

(1) whether a barrister has a current practising certificate, and (2) whether a barrister has any disciplinary findings, which are published on the Bar Standards Board’s website in accordance with their policy.

Alternatively, you can contact the Bar Standards Board on 020 7611 1444 to ask about this (or e-mail ContactUs@BarStandardsBoard.org.uk).