Helped a friend bring a complaint to a firm of solicitors in Leeds. In brief, the solicitor told my friend, another solicitor and Counsel that he would request documents from the opposition but never did. Furthermore despite being instructed to copy all correspondence he did not forward letters which would have alerted my friend that he had not done so. My friend proceeded on the basis that the opposition had ignored the request and made a request for full disclosure prior to mediation, the preparation for which ran the bill past 11k.

We got little or no joy from the solicitors except that we were able to demonstrate that their response was actually dishonest. I have asked a couple of friends to look at the matter, one who is a senior local government officer and another was a Head of English in a school for many years and both said that the conduct of the solicitor and the responses of his Head of Dept and Managing Director clearly passed the definition of 'dishonesty' as defined on the LO's own website.

We were allocated an investigator by the LO who investigated on the basis of 'poor service'. I repeatedly told him that the request for the return of the fees was made on the basis of the solicitor's repeated and documented dishonesty which led to an unnecessary course of action and further unnecessary cost. The LO investigator told me his recommendation would not depend upon the charge of dishonesty being proved, that we would be happy with his recommendations and even asked me for the calculation of the whole amount fees minus Counsel's fee (approx. 8k). He assured me I would receive his report shortly. He rang me last week and told me that he had met the LO who had 'advised' him that he could not instruct the return of the fees on the basis of poor service and suggested a compensation payment of £250 (2.2% of his fee). I suggested he not take the advice if this was his view and he told me that the LO was the 'senior person in the organisation'. The whole process has taken in excess of six months, it bears no resemblance to that as outlined on their website. We have spent over 50 hours reading and scanning the entire correspondence file and writing letters of complaint.

I have not yet received the report and there is an opportunity to seek an LO's decision but it will be considered by the LO who has given the advice and it is final. I've worked in education and the public service for 20 or so years and this will rank as one of the most extraordinary and shocking experiences of my entire life.

Has anyone else had experiences of the Legal Ombudsman?

Have you complained to the Solicitors Regulation Authority about the solicitor in question ?

No, not yet. I looked at the 'Solicitor's From Hell' website (which I initially thought was a load of hysterical ravings) and the consensus is that's a bigger waste of time than the LO.

I don't want to come across as someone who's totally lost perspective on this. I've dealt with some very decent solicitors. I don't believe they're all crooks but as someone who is used to systems of process and accountability and fundamentally believe they are glue which holds society together, this has come as a very profound shock and I'm not sure if I can start again with another process that appears at best, arbitrary and at worst dystopian. Maybe I am getting hysterical.

LO is the successor to the Legal Complaints Service, and quite probably equally as useless. When they do award compensation, it is pitifully low.

I had cause to complain to the LCS once. Got a 5 sided letter back from someone insecure enough to sign off their name with their MBE, informing me that my complaint was time-barred.

This was despite the fact the LCS had advised me to try and resolve things first through the internal complaints process of the solicitor I ended up complaining about. Which was the reason I was time-barred.

No you are not hysterical. When I first met Mrs Dally she had had a dispute with her family. Their solicitors wrote to her saying she had agreed a course of action in a meeting held at their offices on a specified date. In fact, she could demonstrate via her office work timesheets that she was working 150 miles away at the specified date. When she pointed that out they saw her point of view! For some reason, despite them lying in writing she let them off from complaining to the Law Society (pre-SRA).