Three solicitors, but no barristers, have been appointed to the body charged with setting up and running a new consumer complaints system for the legal profession. The Legal Services Board on Tuesday named the six successful candidates for appointment to the Office for Legal Complaints, due to become operational next year.
The solicitor members are family lawyer and mediator Rosemary Carter of East Anglia firm Kerseys, Professor Mary Seneviratne, head of the centre for legal research at Nottingham Law School, and David Thomas, corporate director and principal ombudsman at the Financial Ombudsman Service.
Elizabeth France was last year appointed to chair the independent office.
The members will take up their posts on 1 July and serve for three years.
An LSB spokesman said the Legal Services Act 2007, which set up the new body, requires the board to be made up of legal and lay members, with a majority of lay members – but it does not stipulate a mix of legal professionals. The LSB made the appointments after an open competition in which the best-qualified legal candidates were all solicitors, he said.
Russell Wallman, the Law Society’s director of government relations, said: ‘The solicitor members are very high calibre. It looks like the board has given itself every chance of understanding the issues that arise between solicitors and their clients, and it will help pave the way towards an improved and more proportionate way to resolve disputes.’
Desmond Browne QC, Bar Council chairman, said: ‘The Bar Council looks forward to working with the OLC to create a system which will ensure the effective resolution of justified complaints, where those cannot be dealt with in chambers.’
Meanwhile the LSB confirmed in its first business plan that it will create a specialist panel to ensure consumers’ views are heard. The independent body’s chief executive Chris Kenny told the Gazette the panel will consist of eight or nine people with consumers’ views going to the ‘heart of policy-making’, giving the board a ‘quick reality check’ when needed.
The LSB is responsible for overseeing the regulation of lawyers in England and Wales, and reforming and modernising the legal services market.
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