Our 2020-24 strategy
This was to be the last year of our strategy, although we have extended the strategic aims for a further year to cover a period of uncertainty coming from reform. Despite the extension, we have evaluated the four years of work as this was the original timeframe we committed to when publishing the plan to stakeholders.
In the four years since 1 July 2020, we have accomplished a great deal. Here are a few highlights.
Our organisation has changed significantly over the strategy period. We kept our staff safe and supported during Covid-19 and managed to maintain our normal services throughout. We changed our organisational ways of working, became a fully digital organisation, moved property in a half million-pound savings package and received external recognition of various aspects of our HR practice.
We kept a strong focus on our core complaints service, continuing to deliver improvements for our customers. We reduced our complaint journey time and won an award for our process improvement work. We continued to apply agile approaches to rapidly develop and test new approaches in a number of areas. We established a cross-organisational Service Experience Team to help drive improvements in our customer service. A multi-year project focused on making our communications clearer and more accessible included staff training, a review of all our templates, and new quality assurance systems. Our internal auditors provided assurance that the learning was being applied in practice.
We delivered a new approach to discharging our oversight powers and have seen commitments from the relevant professional organisations to improve their complaint processes, based on our recommendations. We’ve updated our guidance for the profession on good complaint handling and disseminated it to practitioners across the country through our website, training sessions, 1:1 support for firms and our social media channels.
Over the last four years we’ve used our experience and expertise to help inform the debate on regulatory reform and the development and passage of the Regulation of Legal Services (Scotland) Bill. We’ve supported our Consumer Panel to bring the voice of consumers to the debate and welcomed their input to our wider improvement work.
We’ve worked with stakeholders across the legal sector, consumer groups and the third sector, government, parliament and beyond. We’ve focused on constructive, purposeful engagement to help share insight and drive improvement, and we’ve seen the impact of that across many different areas of our work.
In some areas we’ve seen less progress due to external factors we have no control over. That includes the implementation of the Legal Services (Scotland) Act 2010. Despite our best efforts over the strategy period, we have not seen improved compliance by solicitors with their duty to provides files for investigation.
It has been a busy four years. Despite significant uncertainty in the external environment, we’ve delivered much of what we set out in our strategy and we’re very proud of what our team has achieved.