Complaints against Irish solicitors at historic low

New figures published by the Law Society of Ireland show that complaints were made on just 0.09 per cent of instructions carried out by solicitors in 2017, two-thirds fewer compared to 20 years ago.

The vast majority (94 per cent) of all solicitors had no complaints made against them in 2017.

Law Society director general Ken Murphy said: “Transparency is important to the Law Society. By publishing these figures we can show that clients can rely on their solicitor more now than at any other time in the recent past, certainly in the last twenty years.”

The figures were revealed in the latest Law Society Gazette.

Mr Murphy said: “The data shows that the overwhelming majority of solicitors’ instructions are handled correctly, professionally and to the satisfaction of the client. In fact, we can now estimate that 99.91 per cent of instructions never result in a complaint.

“These are figures the solicitors’ profession can be proud of. They demonstrate the high quality of legal services and client care provided by solicitors as well as the general high level of client satisfaction.”

As a general rule, complaints are made per instruction rather than per solicitor. A rule-of-thumb estimate is that each practising solicitor carries out an average of 100 instructions per year.

As there were 10,499 practising solicitors in 2017, the Law Society estimates that there were 1,049,900 instructions completed last year.

These instructions resulted in just 986 admissible complaints, or 0.09 per cent of the total. This is 63 per cent lower than the peak of complaints in 2011 (2,667) and 34 per cent lower than the average number of admissible complaints over the last 20 years (1,485).

Despite the fluctuations in the number of complaints, the number of solicitors against whom complaints have been made has been decreasing steadily at an average rate of 0.4 per cent per year.

The size of the solicitors’ profession has grown significantly rising from 4,950 in 1998 to 7,867 in 2007 and to 10,499 in 2017. When numbers of practising solicitors are taken into account, the likelihood that complainants will make a complaint against a solicitor is half of what it was ten years ago (9 per cent in 2017 as against 18 per cent in 2007) and two-fifths of what it was in 1998 (22.4 per cent).

At the end of 2017, the proportion of solicitors against whom an admissible complaint has been made is at a 20-year low, at just 6.2 per cent (650 of 10,499 practising solicitors) – from a high of 14.7 per cent (727 of 4,950 solicitors) in 1998. In 2017, 94 per cent of solicitors had no complaints made against them.