Complaints – How to handle them well!

Description

Complaints - How to handle them well!

Introduction

Complaints are part of our standard business risk. Clients’ expectations of our standards of
service and costs is higher than – they want more for their money! It’s never nice to have a
complaint land on your doorstep but there are certain things you can do to help prevent it.
People complain because they can! We all do it – we complain about the costs of goods, we
complain about the service in a restaurant, we complain because people don’t ring us back or
turnup to do a job on time. Our clients are no different. They complain because we don’t give
them the service they were expecting, we didn’t call them back when we should have, or we
didn’t tell them how much a matter was going to cost.

What can we put in place to help stop complaints before they start? What is in our complaints
policy and procedure? How much information do we give our clients?

What you will learn

• What do clients complain about the most:
o Costs
o Communication
o Delays
o Failure to follow instructions
• What areas of law receive the most complaints
• What do the SRA Standards and Regulations say
• What’s in your complaints policy and procedures
• What makes a good complaints procedure
• The Legal Ombudsman – facts, figures and good practice
• How can we stop a complaint before it even starts
• What your staff need to do to lower the risk of a complaint

The Speaker

Joanna Morris has over thirty years’ experience of working in solicitors’ practices from being a
legal cashier, practice manager and training manager. Joanna is a freelance trainer and
consultant, having previously been the Risk and Regulatory Compliance Training Manager at a
top 40 law firm.

Jo currently delivers training in many compliance subjects, both to the public and in-house
clients, on AML, GDPR, SRA Accounts Rules and courses designed specifically for the MLRO,
DPO, COLP and COFA. She is a qualified NVQ assessor and holds a Certificate In Education for Teaching in the Lifelong Learning Sector.

She was highly commended in June 2011 by the Legal Education and Training Group (LETG) in
the category ‘Best Programme for Lawyers for Solicitors Accounts Rules Training’. She was
shortlisted in the Compliance Trainer of the Year category in the C5 Women in Compliance
Awards in 2014.