We are committed to providing a high-quality legal service. We acknowledge that we may not always get it right, so if something has gone wrong, including in relation to our charges, we need you to tell us. Please inform us immediately so that we can do our best to resolve the problem for you. This will also help us to improve our standards of service. 

Complaints about our service 

This section deals with complaints about our legal service. These complaints can be escalated to the Legal Ombudsman. If your complaint is about how we have handled your personal data, please see the separate section below on data protection complaints, which are escalated to the Information Commissioner’s Office rather than the Legal Ombudsman. 

How do I make a complaint? 

In the unlikely event that you are not happy with our service, please contact our Complaints Officer, Crystal Boyde, on 07305 875498 or by email to crystal.boyde@thrivelaw.co.uk. If your complaint is about Crystal, please contact Jodie Hill on 0113 869 8101 or by email to jodie.hill@thrivelaw.co.uk. 

To help us understand your complaint, and so that we do not miss anything, please tell us: 

• your full name and contact details; 

• the details of your complaint; 

• how you would like your complaint to be resolved; and 

• your file reference number, if you have it. 

If you require any help in making your complaint, we will try to help you. 

How will you deal with my complaint? 

We will write to you within two working days acknowledging your complaint and enclosing a copy of this policy. There may be occasions where our Client Care Director is away from the office, in which case we may take a little longer to acknowledge and deal with your complaint. If so, we will contact you as soon as we are able and advise you of any changes to our timescales. 

We will investigate your complaint. This will usually involve: 

• reviewing your complaint; 

• reviewing your file or files and other relevant documents; and 

• liaising with the person who dealt with your matter, where this is not the complaints handler. 

We may also need to ask you for further information or documents. If so, we will ask you to provide the information within a specific period of time. We will update you on the progress of your complaint at appropriate times. 

We may also, if appropriate, invite you to a meeting to discuss your complaint. You do not have to attend if you do not wish to or are unable to. We will be happy to discuss the matter with you by telephone or video conference instead. 

We will write to you at the end of our investigation to tell you what we have done and what we propose to do to resolve your complaint. Where possible, we will aim to do this within 21 days of the date of our letter of acknowledgement. 

What to do if we cannot resolve your complaint 

We have eight weeks to consider your complaint. If we have not resolved it within this time, you may be able to have the complaint independently looked at by the Legal Ombudsman. The Legal Ombudsman investigates complaints about service issues with lawyers. This applies if you are an individual, a business with fewer than 10 employees and turnover or assets not exceeding a certain threshold, a charity or trust with a net income of less than £1m, or if you fall within certain other categories. You can find out more from the Legal Ombudsman. The Legal Ombudsman will look at your complaint independently, and this will not affect how we handle your matter. 

The Legal Ombudsman expects complaints to be made to them within one year of the date of the act or omission about which you are concerned, or within one year of you realising there was a concern. You must also refer your concerns to the Legal Ombudsman within six months of our final response to you. 

You can contact the Legal Ombudsman by visiting www.legalombudsman.org.uk, by calling 0300 555 0333 between 9.00 and 17.00, by email to enquiries@legalombudsman.org.uk, or by post to Legal Ombudsman, PO Box 6167, Slough, SL1 0EH. 

Alternative dispute resolution bodies exist which are competent to deal with complaints about legal services, should both you and the firm wish to use such a scheme, such as ProMediate. We have, however, chosen not to adopt an ADR process. If you wish to complain further, you should contact the Legal Ombudsman. 

What to do if you are unhappy with our behaviour 

The Solicitors Regulation Authority can help if you are concerned about our behaviour. This could be for things like dishonesty, taking or losing your money, or treating you unfairly because of your age, a disability or other characteristic. Visit www.sra.org.uk to see how you can raise your concerns with the Solicitors Regulation Authority. 

What will it cost? 

We will not charge you for handling your complaint. Please note that if we have issued a bill for work done on the matter, and all or some of the bill is not paid, we may be entitled to charge interest on the amount outstanding. This is set out in our Terms of Business. The Legal Ombudsman service is free of charge. 

Data protection complaints 

The section above deals with complaints about our legal service, which escalate to the Legal Ombudsman. This section deals separately with complaints about how we have handled personal data. These are different routes. A data protection complaint is one where you believe we have handled your personal data in a way that breaches data protection law. These complaints escalate to the Information Commissioner’s Office (the ICO), not the Legal Ombudsman. 

This section applies to anyone whose personal data we handle. That includes clients, but also employees, contractors, job applicants, website visitors and any other individual. You do not need to be a client to use it. 

How to make a data protection complaint 

You can raise a data protection complaint with us in any of the following ways: 

• by email to data@thrivelaw.co.uk; 

• by post to Second Floor, 5 Park Place, Leeds, LS1 2RU, marked for the Data Protection Lead; or 

• by telephone on 0113 869 8101. 

You can also raise a complaint through any other contact you have with us, and we will still accept it and route it to the right person. If you raise a concern through social media, we will ask you for a secure contact method, because social media is not a secure way for us to handle personal information. 

If you are making a complaint on behalf of someone else, we will need to see evidence of your authority to act for them before we begin our investigation. 

Who deals with your complaint 

Our Data Protection Lead, Rebecca Shah, has responsibility for data protection complaints. You can contact her at data@thrivelaw.co.uk or on 0113 869 8101. If your complaint is about the Data Protection Lead, please contact Jodie Hill on 0113 869 8101 or at jodie.hill@thrivelaw.co.uk. 

How we will handle your complaint 

We will acknowledge your complaint as soon as reasonably practicable and typically within a few working days.   

We will begin looking into your complaint as soon as we receive it. We will not wait for the acknowledgement step to finish before we start. Our investigation will usually involve reviewing what happened, reviewing the relevant records, and speaking to the people involved. We may ask you for further information to help us investigate. 

We will keep you informed of progress, explain any delay, and give you a point of contact for any questions. We will complete our investigation and respond without undue delay and, where possible, within one month, depending on the complexity of the complaint. 

We will give you our outcome in writing and in plain language, so that you can understand what we have decided and why. 

If your concern relates to exercising your data protection rights, for example access, correction or deletion of your personal data, this will be handled under our data protection rights process. Further information is available in our Privacy Policy. 

 

If your complaint covers both our service and our handling of your data 

Some complaints raise both a service issue and a data protection issue. Where that happens, we will deal with the data protection part as quickly as we can, and we will not hold it up while we deal with the wider service complaint. The service part will follow the Legal Ombudsman process set out above. The data protection part will follow this section and may be escalated to the ICO. 

If you are not satisfied with our response 

If you are not happy with how we have handled your data protection complaint, you can raise it with the ICO. The ICO is the UK regulator for data protection. We would normally ask that you give us the chance to resolve your complaint first, but you are entitled to contact the ICO at any time. You can contact the ICO by visiting www.ico.org.uk, by calling 0303 123 1113, or by post to Information Commissioner’s Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF.