One in four going to Ombudsman say lawyers never answer complaints

First the solicitor goes quiet. Then the client complains about being ignored. Then, in far too many cases, the complaint itself disappears into the same silence

That isn’t an anecdote or a disgruntled client shouting into the void. In the year to March 2026, one in four people who approached the Legal Ombudsman said their firm never sent a final response.

The evidence is in the Legal Ombudsman’s Annual Complaints Data and Insight report, published on 23 July 2026. It covers the year from April 2025 to March 2026.

The Ombudsman received 14,259 new complaints, 37% more than the year before. Chief Ombudsman Phil Cain said: “More than 14,000 people turned to LeO for help in 2025/26.” Poor communication and delay accounted for 46% of recorded issues.

Some things you can’t do without a solicitor

There are some things you just can’t do without a solicitor. Buying a home, dealing with an estate after someone dies, claiming compensation after a serious injury, or getting through a divorce.

We pay someone who understands the rules and procedures because the consequences of getting them wrong can be huge. We expect them to take responsibility for work we can’t safely take over.

So when the job seems to stall, it is more than irritating. We may not know what has happened, why it is taking so long, or what we are being charged for.

Then comes the complaint. It isn’t about the house seller, insurer, relative or former partner. It is about the service from the professional paid to get the job done.

The answer that never comes

Law firms must investigate complaints about their service and give clients a final response. Yet a quarter of the people who later approached the Ombudsman said that they never received one.

The Ombudsman says that this suggests that a quarter of complaints reaching it were driven by firms apparently failing to meet their complaint-handling duties. That should be the basic part.

Complaints about unreasonable handling of complaints were raised 990 times during the year, an 84% rise. In the cases the Ombudsman investigated, 46% showed evidence that the firm had handled its client’s complaint unreasonably.

That proportion was slightly lower than the previous year’s 49%. But it still means that in almost half the relevant cases, the client’s attempt to get an answer had been mishandled too.

Buying a home, then chasing an answer

Residential conveyancing, the legal work behind buying and selling homes, was the biggest single source of accepted complaints. The Ombudsman accepted 3,039 conveyancing complaints, 36% of its total.

That was a 41% rise in one year and made up almost three-quarters of the total increase in accepted complaints. Among conveyancing complaints assessed, 78% showed evidence of poor service.

A home move can be the largest financial commitment of someone’s life. Missed deadlines, unclear paperwork and unexplained delays are not minor inconveniences when chains and mortgages are at stake.

Then, when the client asks what went wrong, the firm may leave them chasing again. In 53% of conveyancing investigations, the Ombudsman found evidence of unreasonable complaint handling.

Silence has a price

Across all complaints it assessed, the Ombudsman found evidence of poor service in 72%. It awarded more than £3.7 million in remedies during the year.

In 86% of investigated complaints, it awarded compensation for the emotional effect of the provider’s failings. The average award was £429. In 29%, it recommended cutting, refunding or waiving fees.

Those fee remedies averaged £3,520. The figures do not mean that most legal work goes wrong: the Ombudsman only sees the cases where people feel they need outside help.

But the report does reveal a particularly ugly failure. A solicitor may not be able to make a sale complete overnight, settle an insurance claim or make a family dispute painless.

They can, though, say what is happening. They can explain a delay, explain a bill and answer a complaint. When they don’t, clients are left stranded twice over.

Sources and relevant reading for Complaints about lawyers soar 37% while clients are left in the dark

• Legal Ombudsman, 2025/26 annual complaints data and insight – 23 July 2026
  The primary source for the article’s figures: 14,259 new complaints, the 37% annual increase, the quarter who said they never received a final response, and the central role of communication and delay. It also provides the conveyancing, poor-service, unreasonable-complaint-handling and remedy figures.
• Legal Ombudsman, Getting Started with the Model Complaints Resolution Procedure – 29 July 2026
  Relevant to the article’s point that clients should not have to chase an answer about a complaint. The Ombudsman’s new guidance says complaints should be acknowledged within five working days and that firms have up to eight weeks to provide a final response.
• Solicitors Regulation Authority, Changing our requirements on first-tier complaints: supplementary consultation – July 2026
  Useful wider context: the SRA proposes requiring firms to give clients a timetable when a complaint is raised, and regular updates afterwards. It also records that firms reported more than 41,000 first-tier complaints in 2025, the highest total since the SRA began collecting the data.

Footnote Zone for Complaints about lawyers soar 37% while clients are left in the dark

Disclosure: The diagnostic tools referenced below were developed by NokNok, a specialist in online responsiveness tool design.

This Footnote Zone uses NokNok’s diagnostic toolkit to examine why legal clients can be left without a final complaint response, and how the contact, reply, message-quality and escalation failures behind that silence can be identified and measured.

• Email Finder: The article reports that one in four people who took a service complaint to the Legal Ombudsman said their firm never sent a final response, raising a basic question about whether clients can readily find a usable complaints route. Email Finder scans a firm’s website, complaints policy and other public-facing materials for published email addresses, then reports missing routes, conflicting contact details and other structural contactability gaps.
• Reply Radar: The rise in complaints about poor communication and delay points to unreliable response operations, while an unanswered final response turns the complaints process itself into another queue. Reply Radar deploys targeted test emails to relevant client-service and complaints routes, measuring reply rates, latency and response consistency against defined benchmarks.
• Compliance Sniffer: The Ombudsman found evidence of unreasonable complaint handling in nearly half of the relevant cases it investigated, so a reply alone is not necessarily a meaningful resolution. Compliance Sniffer analyses incoming responses for clarity, relevance, escalation information, communication quality and compliance benchmarks, distinguishing a substantive answer from an empty acknowledgement or evasive message.
• Mystery Shopper: For a client whose legal matter has stalled, the journey from first query to complaint and final response can involve unclear forms, inaccessible routes and broken escalation paths. Mystery Shopper executes an end-to-end responsiveness UX audit, testing how a real user experiences a firm’s contact, response and escalation pathways.

Disclosure: The diagnostic tools referenced in this Footnote Zone were developed by NokNok, a specialist in online responsiveness tool design. ReplyResearch may use NokNok tools, resources, or analysis when preparing coverage, while retaining responsibility for its editorial decisions, including what topics to cover, what sources to cite, and how stories are presented. Read the full ReplyResearch Collaborative Disclosure Policy