The latest Legal Ombudsman business plan should get the profession’s attention.
LeO says demand rose by almost 30% year on year in 2025-26. It is forecasting 17,675 new complaints in 2026-27, which it says would be 174% higher than in 2019-20. It also says this level of demand is beyond what its current operating model can deal with. On the approved budget, LeO expects end-of-year customer wait times of around 330 to 390 days, with between 4,939 and 6,732 complaints waiting for investigation.
Those are striking figures. But they need careful handling.
It would be too easy to say rising complaint volumes prove legal service standards are getting worse in direct proportion. LeO does not say that. It says rising demand reflects service issues and ongoing failures in first-tier complaints handling, but it also points to wider drivers, including increased awareness of redress and the growing use of AI tools in complaint drafting.
That caution is important. If large language models make it easier for consumers to draft coherent and detailed complaints, the increase in complaints may partly reflect a lower barrier to escalation rather than a straight decline in quality. But that does not mean those complaints are without merit. In the first three quarters of 2025-26, LeO says it found evidence of poor service in 72% of complaints with an investigative outcome, and evidence of poor first-tier complaints handling in 46%.
That is why the underlying ombudsman decision data still matters so much.
I have been looking at a spreadsheet of LeO decisions covering the period from 2024/25 Q4 to 2025/26 Q3. Around 72% of decisions involved evidence of poor service. Around 43% involved unreasonable complaints handling by the provider. The most common themes were failure to keep clients informed, failure to respond, poor costs information, delay, failure to progress and poor complaints handling.
That should make firms pause. Clients not kept updated. Calls and emails not answered properly. Costs not explained clearly enough. Matters that drift. Then, when the complaint arrives, it is handled poorly and the position gets worse.
All of which are very much avoidable.
Residential conveyancing remains the biggest culprit. It is the largest category by volume and one of the heaviest for remedies and poor-service findings. LeO’s new business plan points in exactly the same direction. It identifies residential conveyancing as a significant driver of increased demand, with delays and poor communication still at the heart of many complaints.
The new budget also highlights that complaints are landing in a redress system already under visible strain. LeO says demand is outpacing capacity. It also says it will continue quarterly public interest decisions, roll out its Model Complaints Resolution Procedure, and revise its decision-writing process to make it easier ultimately to publish all ombudsman decisions. In other words, the environment is becoming more transparent as well as more pressured.
The public interest decisions are useful here because they give colour to the statistics. LeO says it publishes those decisions where there is evidence of systemic failure, very serious service failure, significant lack of co-operation, or exceptional impact. The published cases include serious conveyancing failures and major costs-information problems, which is exactly the sort of pattern the wider dataset suggests.
Still, it is worth resisting two bad conclusions.
The first is that rising complaint volumes prove standards are collapsing across the board. The latest LeO material does not justify that. Greater awareness, changing consumer behaviour and AI-assisted drafting may all be part of the picture.
The second is that AI-generated complaints can safely be dismissed as opportunistic. That does not follow either. If LeO is still finding poor service in around 72% of investigated complaints, then many of these complaints, however polished they may be, are landing on real underlying weaknesses. AI may make complaints easier to draft. It does not conjure valid complaints out of nowhere.
So what should firms take from all this?
The safest reading is that the LeO landscape is getting harder in two ways at once. The underlying service failings remain familiar: delay, silence, poor communication, weak costs information and poor complaints handling. But consumers are becoming more able to escalate, more willing to escalate, and better equipped to present their complaint in a way that is detailed, structured and difficult to ignore. LeO is also becoming more open about what it is seeing.
That makes first-tier complaints handling more important than ever. LeO is quite open about the fact that poor first-tier complaint handling is part of the demand problem. Too many firms still treat complaints as an irritation rather than a serious risk-control point. That is a mistake. A complaint that is handled well may still be painful. A complaint that is handled badly can become much more expensive, much more entrenched and much more visible.
