Our outreach and oversight work

We have a published statement on our approach to discharging these powers which sets out our intention to work collaboratively and constructively with others in the sector to drive improvement and ensure public confidence.

Following a rise last year, the number of handling complaints we received remains high. These included complaints made by the original complainer and by the practitioner complained about.

As well as investigating individual complaints about relevant professional bodies’ complaint handling, we look at trends in conduct complaint handling and make recommendations for improvements.

We followed up on our recommendations to both the Faculty of Advocates and the Law Society of Scotland on improving conduct complaint handling.

We urged Faculty to implement improvements to its complaints process in line with the recommendations in our 2024 report. While Faculty has committed to making improvements and we know work is underway, this work is not yet concluded. Until this happens, neither complainers nor advocates complained about will benefit from the planned improvements to Faculty’s complaints process.

We also welcomed continued improvements to Law Society of Scotland conduct complaint investigation timescales following recommendations in our 2023 report.

We have powers to consider provisions for ensuing consumer redress, including the effectiveness of the Client Protection Fund and indemnity arrangements.

In 2021 we made a number of recommendations to the Law Society of Scotland regarding the Master Policy indemnity arrangements, and we have continued to monitor this, publishing a further update report in January 2025. We were also invited by the Society to observe part of the retendering of the Master Policy brokering for the coming five-year period.

We published a report on the Law Society of Scotland’s Client Protection Fund arrangements. We concluded that overall the Fund operates well, that the public facing information about the Fund is clear and easy to understand, and that guidance is offered to claimants to support them to make claims which the sub-committee can consider and assess. However, we recommended that the sub-committee ensures claimants are kept updated regularly on the progress of their claims and suggested that seeking feedback from claimants on the quality and accessibility of its communications could provide suggestions for potential improvements. We also raised a specific concern that the sub-committee was not meeting the requirement that at least 50% of its membership should be lay members, and we were pleased to see further recruitment take place to address this.

We took part in a number of conferences and events across the sector on the common causes of complaints and how to deal effectively with them, drawing on case study examples from our caseload. We also spoke directly to firms on issues relating to risk management and complaint handling.

This year we developed and tested new complaint handling workshops for practitioners, which have received good feedback from those who have taken part.

We continued to provide our guidance on good complaint handling in different formats and through different channels, including our website, practitioner newsletter and social media channels, to reach out across the profession.

We shared key messages from last year’s report on price transparency and our guidance on preventing the common causes of complaints as part of a series of social media campaigns.

This year we also launched a new podcast series aimed at practitioners and updated our published information on what practitioners should expect when we receive a complaint about them.