Legal ombudsman

The Legal Ombudsman scheme was created by Pt 6 of the Legal Services Act 2007. Section 122 required the Chief Ombudsman to be a lay person, but permitted assistant ombudsmen with power to determine complaints to be legally qualified. Section 113(1) indicated that the purpose of the scheme was to enable complaints to “be resolved quickly and with minimum formality by an independent person”. Section 137(1) provided that a complaint was to be determined “by reference to what is, in the opinion of the ombudsman making the determination, fair and reasonable in all the circumstances of the case”. There were two important aspects of the scheme revealed by those and other provisions. First, it was intended to resolve complaints swiftly and informally. In order to achieve that, the Ombudsman would often have to do the best he could on limited material and without hearing detailed evidence. To assist in those objectives, he could rely on evidence which