The complaints information every law firm website must publish
Rule 2 applies to every SRA-regulated firm with a website, whatever services it offers. It asks for three things — and most failures come from pages that exist but only deliver one of them.
Sources last verified: 2026-08-12.1 — official SRA links are cited in each section.
What Rule 2 requires
A firm with a website must publish on it:
- Its complaints handling procedure — the actual steps: who to contact, what happens next, and how long the firm takes to respond. “Available on request” does not satisfy a publication rule.
- How and when a complaint can be made to the Legal Ombudsman — the route for complaints about service. “How and when” is doing real work here: the page should explain that the Ombudsman ordinarily expects the complainant to have given the firm the chance to resolve things first (firms typically have eight weeks), and that the Ombudsman applies its own time limits to accepting complaints — with the Ombudsman's contact details or a working link to legalombudsman.org.uk for the current limits.
- How and when a complaint can be made to the SRA — the separate route for concerns about a firm's conduct: dishonesty, losing money, treating someone unfairly because of a protected characteristic, or other breaches of the SRA's rules. Many pages cover the Ombudsman and forget this limb entirely.
Official source: SRA Transparency Rules — Rule 2 · Sources last verified: 2026-08-11
The failures that catch out existing pages
The page exists but says only “if you are unhappy, speak to your solicitor” — a sentence, not a procedure.
The Legal Ombudsman appears as a bare name or logo with no explanation of when a complaint can go there or what the time limits are.
The SRA route is missing entirely, or conduct and service complaints are merged so a reader can't tell which body handles what.
The page was fine — but a site migration broke the link from the footer, so it can no longer be reached from anywhere.
Contact details for the Ombudsman are years out of date, or the linked pages 404.
The procedure lives only in a PDF that isn't linked from any navigation, footer or sitemap.
A structure that works
The firms that get this right usually keep one page, linked from the footer of every page, with four headed sections: our procedure (steps and response times), what to do if you're still unhappy, the Legal Ombudsman (role, when it can look at a complaint, its time limits, contact details), and the SRA (what kinds of concern it handles and how to report them). That structure maps one-to-one onto what Rule 2 asks for, which makes it easy for you — or an automated check — to verify nothing has been lost in a rewrite.
FirmProof's monitor checks this page three ways every week: that a complaints procedure is discoverable at all (SRA.TR.2.PAGE), that the content covers the Legal Ombudsman (SRA.TR.2.LEO), and that it covers complaining to the SRA (SRA.TR.2.SRA). Content judgements are conservatively labelled “Review needed” rather than guessed at — wording nuance is a human call.
Is your complaints page still reachable — and complete?
The free scan checks that your complaints procedure is discoverable and looks at its Legal Ombudsman and SRA coverage, with the exact page and excerpt in the result.
Check your own site