This week the Legal Ombudsman took a small baby step on a very long and distant path that may - or may not - ultimately end in the publication of complaints upheld by LeO against named law firms.

That may or may not happen, and certainly not before February 2012.

But what LeO did begin publishing last week was some anonymised accounts designed to give an insight into the types of complaints it receives, and the way it deals with them.

And it makes for quite a good read.

Each one is a personal story of something that went wrong in the client’s life (because, as we all know, it’s almost always the bad things in life that you need a lawyer for).

So there are tales of people being locked out by their landlords; having plastic surgery that goes wrong; buying a holiday home and then finding in the deeds that it can’t be let out.

While some solicitors in the examples have clearly behaved poorly - like the chap who does not reply to correspondence, and when his exasperated client turns up on his doorstep, assures him that everything is fine and neglects to mention that actually he ceased trading two months ago - in many of the examples it is clear that the complainants are actually just blaming their lawyer because they lost their case, or are blowing small issues out of proportion.

The tone of the stories is very accessible, written in colloquial language, and it is clearly aimed at members of the public rather than solicitors.

So I found it interesting that many of the examples were actually showing that LeO had found in favour of the law firm rather than the complainant.

The client rejected the Ombudsman’s findings in seven of the 12 case studies published.

Far from drumming up business for itself, actually one gets the impression that LeO may be trying to stem the tide of unwarranted complaints that it is probably facing.

After all, the Ombudsman received 500 calls on its first day when it opened last October, and figures to date suggest it will probably have dealt with 80,000 calls by the end of its first year.

Plus, while the vast majority of clients are happy with the service they receive from their lawyer, when things go wrong they do seem to get far angrier with solicitors than they do with other people or businesses who provide a service.

At the extreme end of the spectrum, Samson recently revealed that he had received 10 death threats from dissatisfied complainants.

Perhaps the Ombudsman’s annual report due out on 14th July will shed some further light on the cost of all these complaints to the profession.

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