Welcome to the Legal Ombudsman

The Legal Ombudsman was set up by the Office for Legal Complaints (our board) and established under the Legal Services Act.

Our job is to help resolve disputes between consumers and legal service providers. We do this in two ways:

• Investigating complaints about the service consumers have received from their service provider and working to resolve the situation.
  
  
• Sharing learning from investigations so that providers understand good service and how to resolve complaints themselves.

Each year we resolve around 7,000 disputes between complainants and their service providers.

In this section you can find out more about the people that work at the Legal Ombudsman and the Customer Service Principles which apply to all areas of our work and our performance.

> Visit the corporate section of our Information Centre for information about the work of the Office for Legal Complaints (OLC) and our organisations reports and plans.

> Visit How we work or Make a Complaint to find out more about our complaints process.

The Legal Ombudsman - our story

> Parliament creates The Legal Services Act 2007 to regulate the legal sector and increase access to justice by encouraging competition in the legal sector.

> Sections 114 and 115 of the Legal Services Act 2007 establish the Office for Legal Complaints (OLC) and require them to set up an ombudsman scheme.

> The Legal Ombudsman scheme is established in 2009 and work begins to set up the organisation.

> We accept our first complaints on 6 October 2010.

> The Legal Ombudsman scheme took responsibility for claims management complaints between January 2015 and April 2019.