Legal Ombudsman

✅ Compliant with the UK Government’s Digital Standards (GDS)

✅ Online complaint submissions have increased by 20%

About the Legal Ombudsman 

The Legal Ombudsman is an independent body that helps resolve disputes between consumers and legal service providers. It investigates complaints about the service that consumers have received from legal service providers, helping resolve them, as well as creating and promoting best practices for legal service providers. Each year the Legal Ombudsman helps to resolve over 7,000 disputes across England and Wales.

The challenges

The Legal Ombudsman identified a set of challenges with its website, which needed a complete overhaul. Key to this was the need to improve the image of the organization, and have an online complaints form, allowing consumers to easily record, save and submit their complaints. 

The site needed to be compliant with the UK Government Digital Standards (or the GDS), be accessible, and be bi-lingual. Finally, all data needed to be strictly held within the UK. 

Brightwire’s ready to tackle the challenges

Brightwire is an Umbraco Gold Partner with a range of public sector clients, and a focus on delivering technically excellent custom web solutions. The Umbraco team at Brightwire was appointed to design and deliver a new solution based on Umbraco Cloud. 

The complaint form was custom developed in line with the Government Design System (GDS) and has two parts – an eligibility assessment, and the main complaint form. The Legal Ombudsman has complete control over the form, from adding and editing questions to re-ordering them, adding content in English and Welsh, branching questions, and adding in help. Consumers have an easy, step-by-step process, to filling out all the details – and they can save and come back to it later if they’re not quite ready to send it. 

Only essential data is stored and is subject to strict retention and deletion rules using a scheduled custom Hangfire job – both for submitted form data, as well as data where consumers have saved, but not completed, the complaint form. Part of the Legal Ombudman’s role is to analyze and publish the data it gathers. 

To make this process easier, the Brightwire team built a custom back office section to upload data files and embed PowerBI reports. Data can be presented in a user-friendly, searchable way. Visitors to the site can now easily navigate news and updates, book events, drill down into data, and submit complaints online.