CLIENTS who have been wronged by their lawyer are being let down by outdated legislation that is causing delays in holding practices to account, the head of the Law Society of Scotland has claimed.
Society chief executive Lorna Jack said the problem stems from the fact the current system requires complaints against lawyers to be lodged with the Scottish Legal Complaints Commission (SLCC), which deals with service-related complaints itself and passes those related to a lawyer’s conduct to professional bodies the Faculty of Advocates or the Law Society.
Ms Jack noted that recent court cases brought against the SLCC by advocate David Bartos and law firm Anderson Strathern highlighted that the commission has had some issues deciding which strand complaints relate to. This, she said, means those making the complaints face an even longer wait for resolution.
She added that as the SLCC ended its most recent financial year with 664 cases in hand – a rise from 473 the year before – it is “not a paragon of effectiveness and efficiency”.
“Their core role is to give confidence to the profession and the public that when things come through they know what is service and what is conduct and they pass conduct to us and the Faculty and they get on and deal with service, but it’s not working,” Ms Jack said.
“We need to be able to get conduct complaints into the system quickly – if there’s a real concern about the potential of taking a lawyer off the road that has to come to the professional bodies fast.”
SLCC chief executive Neil Stevenson said that the commission “would tend to agree that complaints take too long”, but he said the reason is that they have to go through “a very legalistic process at the moment”.
“It involves going to four statutory bodies – us, the Faculty, the Law Society and the Scottish Solicitors’ Discipline Tribunal,” he said.
“It may not require four statutory bodies and we could process complaints faster if it was only one or two.
“We do think there’s room for improvement [with the way the SLCC handles complaints] and this year we have introduced some efficiencies,” he added.
Like Ms Jack, Mr Stevenson believes that regulation of the legal profession needs to be overhauled as a matter of urgency and earlier this year the SLCC released a paper detailing the changes it would like to see made. “Unravelling the current complex complaints maze” was top of its priority list.
“The Government needs to step back and look at the system as a whole to see how we can make it better and more efficient,” Mr Stevenson said.
Ahead of this year’s Holyrood elections, the SNP made a manifesto pledge to “take forward a consultation to review the regulation of the legal profession in Scotland”. Although the Government has committed to doing this, no changes are expected to be made in the near term.
A spokesperson for the Government confirmed that it is “in the middle of finalising the arrangements” for that and will “announce what the plan is in the New Year”.
However, as the Government is required to hold a three-month formal consultation and then spend a minimum of two months drafting new legislation the spokesperson admitted that it would be “the second half of next year at best” before any changes are announced.
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