Dual Accountability Capsule

Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) & Legal Ombudsman

Re-engagement - (August 2025)

Dual Accountability Capsule

Section: The SRA – A Record of Silence, Not Scrutiny

They didn’t reject my evidence. They received it.

They didn’t lack consent. I gave it.

They didn’t protect my identity. They warned me it might be guessed.

And when I asked the one question that would confirm whether they’d done their job — they didn’t answer.

Between July and October 2024, I submitted a full evidentiary report to the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA), including:

• A USB containing all relevant emails, legal documents, and court transcripts
• A detailed timeline of events involving my solicitor and the solicitor acting for the Defendant
• A safeguarding request due to serious concerns for both me and my son
• Full written consent for the SRA to contact both firms

Despite this, the SRA responded not with scrutiny, but with reclassification and silence:

• They reframed my complaint as a “service issue,” ignoring breach-based evidence
• They dismissed allegations of abandonment before trial, procedural manipulation, and misleading the court
  • They claimed a referral to the Legal Ombudsman — but never confirmed whether it was made

While undergoing cancer treatment, I contacted a named officer at the SRA and asked directly:

“Can you confirm whether you referred my complaint to the Legal Ombudsman?”

He did not reply.

Weeks later, I contacted the Legal Ombudsman myself. They confirmed:

• No referral had ever been received
• They issued a generic complaint form, absent any acknowledgment of prior context

12 August 2025 – Formal Re-engagement with the SRA

In August 2025, I submitted a formal service complaint to the Solicitors Regulation Authority — not to reassert breaches already dismissed, but to document how those breaches were mishandled, misclassified, and ultimately ignored.

This complaint does not seek review of events already reframed by the SRA. 

It interrogates the SRA’s handling of those events — its failure to scrutinise evidence, act on safeguarding requests, or provide threshold reasoning.

In other words: the service they provided in response to a complaint they claimed was about service.

This mirrors the Challenge Letter submitted to the Legal Ombudsman, creating a dual accountability record that ensures neither body can operate in jurisdictional isolation.

Should they now argue that the complaint is “not a service matter,” such a position would not merely contradict their prior classification — it would expose a system in which reclassification serves silence, not scrutiny.

What began as a regulatory complaint became a contradiction capsule.

What they dismissed as outside scope has become the record of their scope’s collapse. 

Likely Deflection – The Time-Bar Tactic

Given the chronology above, I anticipate the SRA may now claim my complaint falls “out of time.” This would ignore:

• The severity and nature of the breaches (which warrant investigation regardless of timing)
• The exceptional circumstances affecting complaint preparation (health, caregiving, and volume of records)
• Their own failure to act when the submission was timely, thorough, and clearly breach-based. The time-limit argument, if raised, would not reflect procedural fairness.

It would instead reveal an intent to avoid scrutiny by disqualifying evidence, not disproving it.

Closing Reflection

The SRA didn’t fail to act because they lacked evidence.

They failed because they chose not to see it.

And when asked to confirm whether they’d done the bare minimum — they chose not to answer at all.

Legal Ombudsman – From Closure to Challenge

“This record now stands — whether or not you choose to act.” — Final paragraph, my correspondence to the Legal Ombudsman challenge letter, 12 August 2025

On 11 June 2025, the Legal Ombudsman issued a refusal to investigate complaint file F191569, asserting that I was not a direct client of the solicitor acting for the Defendant.

They acknowledged the related live complaint under F181722 but failed to offer discretionary review, referral, or escalation.

At first, I accepted closure. My original dossier entry read:

“Final Note: Why I Will Not Be Responding Further” — a reflection of exhaustion, disbelief, and principled refusal to waste time within a system that had already proven unfit.

August 2025: Re-engagement and Challenge

On 12 August 2025, I re-engaged. A formal Challenge Letter was drafted, addressed to the Legal Ombudsman and referencing both complaint files. It documents:

• Misconduct by the solicitor acting for the Defendant, including misrepresentation, obstruction, and procedural coercion
• Narrative alignment and safeguarding dismissal by my former solicitor and her firm
• Billing irregularities, designed to obscure breaches
• Refusal to investigate clear violations of CPR 1.3, 22.1–22.3, 35.6, and 44.3

The letter asserts that the Ombudsman’s stance doesn’t merely deny redress — it normalises exclusion, shielding regulatory gaps through jurisdictional interpretation.

It addresses their anticipated rebuttal — delay — with this reply:

“This complaint is not belated. It is the earliest moment at which I could safely and meaningfully engage with the evidence and begin to articulate my concerns in a legally intelligible way.”

Reframing Protection

The Legal Ombudsman’s framework prioritises contract over conduct, excluding harm that occurs outside traditional retainer.

Vulnerable parties are treated as out of scope, regardless of impact.

My challenge insists that public protection must not be conditional on instruction, but on harm.

Statement to the Record

This challenge is not a plea for reconsideration.

It is a public contradiction of procedural evasion — and a companion piece to the SRA record.

It includes:

• The Challenge Letter
• Referenced capsules
• Annotated invoices and billing maps
• A cross-linked CPR breach index

No further clarification will be offered unless formally requested, in writing.

The urgency remains. So does the audit.

The structure was built to defer. The procedure made sure it did.

What follows is not a new complaint. It’s the collapse of process itself.

A capsule that documents how billing practices, consent language, and regulatory boundaries were used not to protect the public, but to protect the profession.

This isn’t a shift in topic. It’s the moment where structure becomes strategy—
And strategy becomes harm.

Next

Who Pays What — SRA vs Legal Ombudsman

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