The Legal Complaints Service has shelved plans to publish complaints against solicitors online but said it still favours the idea. Its has passed responsibility for any scheme to its successor body, which comes into being in 2010.

The proposals for publishing complaints would have entailed posting detailed information of upheld, adjudicated complaints on the Legal Complaints Service website to provide transparency and openness. The aim was that it would also aid consumers selecting legal services.

Is that a collective sigh of relief one can hear…?

Similar initiatives have been carried out in other professions such as the surgeons’ operative death rates online. The Law Society Society dismissed the scheme as a ‘naming and shaming’ exercise that would have had ‘an unhelpful and damaging effect on the profession’ and it was obviously not popular amongst members of the profession either.

Concerns raised by solicitors suggested that publishing complaints would encourage firms to act defensively, driving up costs; and that it would promote a compensation culture rather than a customer-focused culture within the profession. Hmmm

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