Complaints handling

Our complaints procedure :

We are committed to providing a high quality legal service to our clients. When something goes wrong we need you to tell us about it. This will help us to address the problem and improve our standards.

If you have a complaint, please contact Andrew Brook either by telephone tel 01642 7215324, email : andrew@abrooksolicitors.com or letter : Andrew Brook Solicitors, Springboard Business Centre, 24 Ellerbeck Way, Stokesley TS9 5JZ. Andrew Brook is the person with overall responsibility for complaints. However, if your complaint is about Andrew our Helen Tate will take overall responsibility.

1. Within three days we will send you a letter/e-mail acknowledging your complaint and asking you to confirm or explain the detail of your complaint such as the quality of our services, delay in providing our services or in respect of your dealings with a member of our firm.

2. Your complaint will then be investigated by examining the relevant file and discussing the issues raised with our staff or professionals involved in the matter.

3. If appropriate we will invite you to meet Andrew/Helen to discuss and hopefully resolve your complaint. We would hope to be in a position to arrange such a meeting no longer than 14 days after first receiving your complaint. If you would prefer not to meet, or if we cannot arrange this within the agreeable timescale, Andrew/Helen will write to you setting out their views and appropriate solution.

4. At this stage, if you are still not satisfied, please let us know. We will then arrange to review our decision. We would generally aim to do this within 10 days. This will happen in one of the following ways:

We will arrange for someone in the firm who has not been involved in your complaint to deal with it
We will ask another independent local solicitor or the local law society to investigate your complaint and report back to him
We will invite you to agree to independent mediation

5. We will let you know the result of the review within five days of the end of the review. At this time we will write to you confirming our final position on your complaint explaining our reasons.

6. If we are unable to resolve the complaint with you then you can have the complaint independently looked at by the Legal Ombudsman. The Legal Ombudsman investigates problems about poor service from solicitors. Before accepting a complaint for investigation the Legal Ombudsman will check that you have tried to resolve your complaint with us first. If you have, then you must take your complaint to the Legal Ombudsman:

No more than one year from the date of the act or omission being complained about; or
No more than one year from the date when you should have realised that there was cause for complaint;

and

Within six months of receiving a final response to your complaint.

If you would like more information about the Legal Ombudsman please contact them:

www.legalombudsman.org.uk Call 0300 555 0333 between 10am to 4pm.

Email enquiries@legalombudsman.org.uk

Legal Ombudsman PO Box 6167 Slough SL1 0EH

7. If you have concerns about our behaviour, such as dishonesty, taking or losing your money or treating you unfairly because of your age, a disability or other characteristic then you can raise your concerns with our regulators, the Solicitors Regulation Authority at http://www.sra.org.uk/consumers/problems/report-solicitor.page

Conclusion:

If you have any questions surrounding our complaints procedure please do not hesitate to contact us. Please be assured that we take your concerns seriously and we will seek to listen, learn and resolve any problems as quickly and openly as we can.

Privacy Policy

ANDREW BROOK SOLICITORS - PERSONAL INFORMATION MANAGEMENT AND RETENTION POLICY (“Our Privacy Policy”)

Andrew Brook Solicitors is registered as a data controller with the Information Commissioner’s Office, which is the UK’s independent body dealing with data matters.This policy was updated on 25 May 2018 in response to a change in data protection law in the UK.

Personal Data of our clients : We take our obligations under privacy and data protection law very seriously. This Privacy Policy is designed to help you understand :

1. What Personal Information we collect

2. Why we need it, how we use it and

3. Who we share it with

4. How long we keep it

5. How to up date, correct or complain about the data we hold

1. The information we will need from you will be your name, address, date of birth, financial position, national insurance number, passport, driving licence, We may hold sensitive information about you such as information about your faith, race and sexual orientation, your health, criminal convictions and information about previous court proceedings.

2. Your documentation is required for identity purposes, for legal aid funding purposes and it also to assist in your case. If you do not provide relevant information it may delay or prevent funding of your case or prevent us from providing our services.

3. The information we hold is shared within the rules of the court, the rules of the law and the terms of the Legal Aid Agency. This sharing of information may include the court, all parties to court proceedings that you are involved in and may include ; a children's guardian; court experts; solicitors for other parties barristers (and ultimately our file auditors may chose your file as part of an audit of our business procedures). Please note that we may process your personal information without your knowledge or consent where this is required or permitted by law

4. Once we have finished your case and funding has been settled the paper copy of your file of papers including your personal information will be shredded by us on site without delay, However your file and personal information will continue to be stored digitally and will be retained by us for a period of six years. Your digital file may be kept longer than six years within our archived system if we consider it may be helpful to proceedings involving you in the future.

5. You are entitled at any time to ask us for a copy of the personal information we hold about you, This is known as a Data Subject Access Request. You are also entitled to ask that any information we hold about you is supplemented, updated or rectified. You can make any of these requests free of charge by contacting us.

In certain circumstances you can also ask us to restrict our processing of your personal information eg if you contest the accuracy of it. We will always review your request and will inform you of the action we have taken. If you require us to stop processing your personal information in any way, this may impact on our ability to provide our services to you. You are also entitled to ask that we send a copy of the personal information we hold about you to another organisation, for example if you intend to instruct another service provider (instead of us). We aim to respond to your request within one month of your request, if not sooner.

For further information on your rights you may wish to refer to the guidance provided from the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) on individuals rights under the General Data Protection Regulation.We hope that we can resolve any query or concern you may raise about our use of your personal information. If you want to complain about how we have handled your personal information please follow the procedure in our complaints policy (which we will sent promptly to you upon request). If you are not satisfied with our response under our complaints policy or believe we are processing your personal information unlawfully, you can complain to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office. Further information is available on the ICO website or telephone 0303 123 1113.

Our contact information is : Andrew Brook of Andrew Brook Solicitors - 24 Ellerbeck Way Stokesley TS9 5JZ Tel 01642 715324